Apocalyptic Science

In 2003, an eminent British astronomer published a book entitled Our Final Century with the subtitle:

A SCIENTISTS WARNING:
How terror, error, and environmental disaster
threaten humankind’s future in this century
– on earth and beyond.

It tells of how during the 20^th century, humanity was first presented with the real risk of its own self-destruction through nuclear catastrophe, and how now, with so many more dangers, it is down to an even chance that our species will extinguish itself before this new century is through. Thus, the title Our Final Century refers to the likelihood of the extinction of the human species before this century is out. The message is clear: The end is nigh.

Published in the USA as Our Final Hour, this book revives the idea of the Doomsday Clock, a symbol of the cold war arms race, where a clock ticking through its eleventh hour is poised at so many minutes to midnight. At first sight the clock as a metaphor for temporal finality seems wrong. The persistent and endless motion of the clock’s hands suggests more a Buddhist sansara than the Christian teleology or eschatology.  But that is the point. The hands are seen relentlessly moving towards midnight just as they have always done, as though they might be saying: However bad things might seem now, tomorrow is another day. But this tomorrow is not another day. We don’t know precisely when this will happen, but when it does happen the hands won’t pass over the top of the clock just as they have always done. The scientist’s warning is that the time-bomb is set, the end will surely come. The scope of this temporal quantification of the risk of imminent annihilation is expanded in Our Final Century (as elsewhere) beyond the cold war nuclear threat and towards a complete aggregation of all catastrophic risks to humanity. Our Final Century is a scientific summation of all these fears; and so, if the minutes-to-midnight metaphor was not already crowding out old anti-nuclear book titles, this book might well have been called Our Final Minutes.

The original apocalyptic tipping point (Van Eyk 1420-2)

Lurking behind the dial of this Doomsday Clock is of course the eschatology of the original Christian Doomsday – the prophesy of the Last Day revealed in the last pages of the Bible. And we should note right away that this is no casual invocation of a religious imperative. On the contrary, the Doomsday metaphor is entirely apt for the most extreme magnitude of the threat our scientist wishes to convey. Our Final Century is not speaking here of a degradation. This is not a browning out, where the living conditions get worse and worse in a degradation of the ecosystem. Nor are we to envisage a qualified disaster, where nuclear war might kill, if not ourselves, then most of the people we know or care about – as was widely experienced in the Black Death, the 30 Year War, the Potato Famine, or any number of other scourges of the last few centuries. This is not of the scale of killing and maim inflicted upon a tribe or races in the various failed attempts at genocide of the last few decades. Nor is it about our final century of civilisation; a return to the dark ages, to poverty and filth, to brutal chaos and primitive barbarity. The scientists warning is of much more than this. We are threatened with the idea of a global annihilation such that there will be no more ideas, no more knowledge, no memory, no history. Such absolute forgetting threatens the collective ego of society in the most absolute way. And, if this apocalypse does not always imply immediate extinction, then, like the nuclear winter scare, the threat is of one terrible dawn of doom, when the fate of humanity will be much like the dammed in those medieval paintings – beyond the tipping point into hell, a place of no return.

In Our Final Century these last days of humanity are painted into the even bigger picture and timescale of the modern astronomer:

If our solar system’s entire lifecycles…were to be viewed in fast forward in a single year, then all recorded history would be less than a minute in early June. The twentieth century would flash past in a third of a second. The next fraction of a second, in this depiction, will be ‘critical’: in the 21^st century, humanity is more at risk than ever before from the misapplication of science. And the environmental pressure induced by collective human actions could trigger catastrophes more threatening than any natural hazards.

On this astronomical scale we are now reduced to Our Final fraction-of-a-Second. And while it is clear why the obliteration of one species is ‘critical’ and significant to that species – and perhaps significant to the history of life in general if we trigger a mass extinction – it is not clear why the demise of humanity is significant or critical to this bigger story.  But this is not the apparent rhetorical purpose of this passage, which is instead to heighten the importance of our present moment. We are at this very moment poised upon a monumental cusp – the tipping point of a history writ almost inconceivably large.

The investment of a profound historical significance to the current place-time is another quintessential element of the genre of apocalyptic preaching invoked by this book, and we cannot deny what is altogether so apparent in this text, namely, that here we have yet another doomsayer in the tradition of Jewish Daniel, the Christian John and the Prophet of Florence, Girolamo Savonarola.  Only this time he is uninspired, sober, reasonable, and wearing the cloak of science. What are we to make of this?

If we begin to question not so much the likelihood of imminent finality, but to question more precisely whether modern science has the means to make such a prediction, then we might question whether this scientist has departed from the rigor of science only to abuse its name with terrific fancy. Whatever the case, we should not suppose that his shift from astronomy to millenarian jeopardised his scientific career. On the contrary, it seems to have advanced it.

Following publication in 2003, our scientist-doomsayer went about promoting his prediction of imminent species annihilation in guest lectures and public forums. This provoked only muted criticism, and much applause. In 2005 he was promoted to English peerage and to the leadership of Britain’s premier scientific institution, so that there are now few scientists with more institutional authority than this man. This scientist of whom we speak is a most unlikely figure of a leader, let alone prophet-of-doom; he is the unassuming and quietly spoken current president of the Royal Society, Martin Rees.

The Apocalypse and the Society

Lord Rees is this month presiding over the 350^th anniversary celebrations of what is surely the most important scientific institution in the history of modern science. It was the Royal Society of London that made the breakthrough of a state-sponsored institution to promote natural science as a distinct domain of knowledge. After centuries of conflict with the state-churches, and after many all-but-forgotten failures, it was upon this achievement by a small group of English gentlemen that other states across Europe and the New World drew the confidence to institute similar organisations upon its model, and these institutions were so successful that today’s landscape of modern institutionalised science owes more to the promotional strategy of the early Royal Society than to pretty much anything else.

For those who celebrate science there is much to celebrate here. And yet there is one disquieting disjunction between the promotion of science in those early days and the promotion of science in recent times. This is that in those early days there would have been no place for the sort of apocalyptic alarmism advanced by Lord Rees. On the contrary, the early Royal Society promoted empirical science as a sober and reasonable alternative to those speculating scary scenarios of future calamity. Natural science was promoted to calm existential fears, not to inflame them. The first break-though was achieved by marketing science not only as opposed to the apocalyptic fear-mongering but also as a remedy for it.

With this recent change in the attitude towards speculative alarmism, we see the Royal Society and its clones now aggressively promoting science in the prognosis of various self-inflicted environmental apocalypses, but most especially the one that involves runaway global warming. In the last decade the most successful mode of science promotion has been by fear, not against it. After three and a half centuries we have indeed reached an extraordinary moment in the history of institutionalised science. Whether this is an anomaly or a turning point it is hard to say, for it is still early days and science is still riding a wave of good-will driven by centuries of trusted protocol and practice. Since the beginning, the position of science in society has always been precarious, but it has been widely recognised as serving society well by drawing attention to the evidence-base so as to calm the sorts of panic arising out of superstition and rumour that we now associate with pre-modern times. On this anniversary it might pay to recall the intent and circumstances of what the Royal Society first set in train, as there may be some lessons today in the dangers of dabbling in what was then called ‘enthusiasm.’

The Marketing of Science in the Restoration

The Royal Society's first venture in the marketing of science

The celebrating this month marks a meeting on the evening of 28 November 1660, in the throes of the Restoration, only months after the return of the crown prince to London. It is indeed recorded that agreement was reached at this meeting to form what became the Royal Society. However, the real historical breakthrough came after the coronation of Charles II, after royal approval was achieved in 1662, and perhaps even later when in 1663 a full charter was properly set forth with the King’s Declaration of himself as founder and patron, all under the motto Nullius in Verba. And even this was not enough to establish the position of the Society. From the beginning the founders were most sensitive to misunderstandings and slander, already begun, about its antagonism of church and state, and insinuations of science covertly serving to promote sectarian dogmas or notorious atheism (of the Machiavellian and the Hobbesian and Epicurean variety). To meet the real expectations of an onslaught, as early as 1662 it was decided to draft an extensive official apology. It would be a draft of the Society’s design, in order to be shown to such as might be benefactors. To this purpose the Society engaged a writer known for his unaffected eloquence but without scientific credentials, the young Thomas Sprat. In every way that we might imagine it today, this was an exercise in marketing. Eventually published as The History Of The Royal Society, this full length book was used to carefully position the Society’s institution and practices in a domain of ideas that could not have been more fraught with division and conflict.

Since the early Renaissance, the problem of success for public science had always been about how to open a space for scientific knowledge without overly threatening the spiritual authority of the state churches, and so the keys to the early political success of the Royal Society was the way it came to demonstrate its ability to qualify this threat while nonetheless maintaining its independence. Following the first outbreak of Civil War, there had been an attempt to establish a revolutionary institution of empirical science research that was to be part of the completion of a total reformation as was the project of the apocalyptic Puritans. This model achieved a deal of attention from the parliaments of the Interregnum, and indeed involved some eminent scientists (including Oldenburg and Boyle who would be founding members of the Royal Society), but it was entirely unsuited to the Restoration. Also during this same turbulent period, the head of Wadham College in Oxford, John Wilkins, had been quietly hosting natural science meetings upon a very different model. Only with the Restoration of the Monarchy did Wilkins move to London and become the genius behind the strategic design of the society for experimental knowledge that was to prosper under crown sponsorship. With its success as a state-sanction institution, and through its championing of Newton physics, it became the model for so many other similar institutions across Europe and the New World.

Although himself a priest, Wilkins’ design was secular in every way. Firstly the Society declared neutrality on matters of religio-political import, for, as the History explains, its members openly professed not to lay the foundation of an English, Scotich, Irish, Popish, or Protestant philosophy but a philosophy of mankind. And it was indeed remarkable, considering the times, that the first members were aligned to various protestant creeds, and from both sides of the Civil War – Wilkins himself was married to Cromwell’s sister. Nor did they hesitate in electing eminent continental scientists who were Catholics. This policy allowed them to position the Society as the foremost international club for the virtuosos of European science.

The subject matter of the science was also deemed secular, for it was restricted so as not to come into conflict with the state-instituted dogmas of reveal religion. Natural science studies the world as it is created, as a sign and artefact of its creation, but it does not address the questions of its creation or the nature of the creator-God. The members of the Society meddle no otherwise with divine things, than only as the power, and wisdom and goodness of the creator is displayed in the admirable order, and workmanship of the Creatures. And the Royal Society is abundantly cautious not to intermeddle in Spiritual things nor do they meddle with introspective of the Faculties and operations of their souls. Thus, the Society proclaimed for itself an outward looking science that would not consider the generation of that which is observed, nor the nature of that which is doing the observing. By these constraints, the inner-God of the prophets and the outer-God-Creator of the state-Church were beyond permissible scientific inquiry.

In hindsight we can see that these constraints tended to produce an unchanging and objectified world as viewed by an external observer – and this would forever cause problems at the limits of science, problems that would only come into crisis much later (with Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg etc). At the time it also exposed natural science to the accusations of atheism. For the philosophy of science that prospered within these restraints (epistemological empiricism and ontological materialism) was recognisably Epicurean, and Epicureanism was a synonym for atheism. And cop these accusations they did! Remarkably, in the fraught mood of the Restoration, in the desperation to restore the peace, this atheistic orientation of science was no longer of such a critical concern as it had been during the Renaissance. It was indeed problematic, but in the politics of the English Restoration the opening for science was just here, in the God-less practice of the ancient Epicureans – a distraction from the religio-political sphere that it left well alone.

But religio-political neutrality and diversion was not sufficient to justify the introduction of a new domain of knowledge. Science must be seen to have a positive role in the restoration peace and stability under the king. And this is where the Society proclaimed science useful to society as more than a distraction, as a remedy for the ‘spiritual vices’ of the times. Science would be a panacea for these ‘enthusiastical times.’ The timely impact of such a claim needs some explaining.

Apocalyptic Enthusiasm

It was widely held during the Restoration that the parliamentary rebellion had been stirred up by the religious enthusiasm of fanatical Puritans, and that this not only lead to the turmoil of Civil War but to the eventual murder of the King (the father of Charles II). The enthusiasm of Cromwell’s New Model Army had a particular millenarian flavour. It was dominated by a loosely united religious sect later known as the Fifth Monarchy Men. These soldiers imagined their fight as elevated to the final battle of ‘the saints’ against demonic forces. They were saving the world from evil so as to initiating the reign of God on earth – as prophesied in the Apocalypse of Daniel. The army was enthused into battle by preachers who had received direct divine inspiration (‘enthuse’ from ‘en-theos’ means ‘god-within’ and some of these preachers look to modern eyes every bit the casebook psychotic). Once victory was attained, in the interlude of the Commonwealth, there was an attempt to institute a ‘council of saints’ with the so-called Bare-Bones Parliament – the closest England ever came to a theocracy. When this failed, the preachers turned on Cromwell and pronounced him the anti-Christ. With so much support from within the army it was hard for Cromwell to do more than contain and tolerate these attacks, and they indeed contributed to the destabilising of the precarious and short-lived periods of peace under his rule.

The other aspect of religious enthusiasm was less militaristic but sometimes just as destabilising. The killing of the English king was also the killing of the head of the English Church. Cromwell was in no position or inclination to impose some new authority, and so in the unprecedented condition of religious freedom up sprang all sorts of religious sects, many of whom were led by apocalyptic prophets. The Quakers in their early days were one such group, but there were so many more. With the social structure sometime appearing on the verge of collapse –  ‘the world turned upside down’ – millenarian panics would sporadically sweep uncontrollable though towns and villages only to exacerbate this social breakdown. The ruling classes came to view the enthusiasts and their swarms of followers as a highly volatile and unpredictable threat to the social structure upon which their power rested. And with the Restoration, it was not as though these movements would suddenly disappear. Moreover, behind every anti-Royalist insurgency could always be found some apocalyptic scenario driving the rebels into mortal combat.

Nor did it help matters when apocalyptic predictions seemed to come true. From the outset of the Restoration, anonymous anti-royalist pamphlets began circulating about a predicted apocalyptic turning point in 1666. This was according to the formula ‘666,’ and under the heading Mirabilis Annus, the propitious year of wonder. When 1666 came around, Londoners at least would be forgiven for wondering if this prophesy was being realised. The Great Plague of 1665 had brought the commerce of the city to a stand still, with the fleeing upper classes returning to find 20% of the population dead. Then the following year a great fire swept across the city destroying the homes of 70,000 of the 80,000 inhabitants.

The writing of the History of the Royal Society had actually been delayed by these calamities, but it was published in 1667 amidst the heighten threat of ‘enthusiastic’ upheaval that they engendered. In a part of the book written after the Plague and Fire, the History proclaimed the power of science to quell this unrest by promoting a sober and reasonable temper, and a healthy scepticism. In support of scientific scepticism against enthusiast credulity, Sprat asserts that the incredulous temper is not a disgrace, but the honour of Experiments. He declared empirical science – called ‘experiments’ – to be…

…the most seasonable study, for this present temper of our nation. This wild amusing men’s minds with prodigies and conceits of providences has been one of the most considerable causes of those spiritual distractions of which our country has long been the theatre….it is now the fittest season for experiments to arise, to teach us a wisdom which springs from the depths of knowledge, to shake off the shadows and to scatter the mists which fill the minds of men with a vain consternation.

And science will serve to protect the Church:

The Church of England will not only be safe amidst the consequences of a rational age, but amidst all the improvements of knowledge, and the subversion of old opinions about nature.’

Sprat suggests that it is in the interests of the Church to encourage empirical science for it can be to the Church what the oak tree is to the Empire, ‘an ornament and defence to the soil wherein it is planted.’ Experimental science protects the Church against ‘spiritual vices’ which are much more of a concern right now than the carnal vices:

But this is certain that the spiritual vices of this age have will nigh contributed as much towards, it, as the Carnal: And for these the most efficious remedy that man of himself can use, is not so much the sublime part of divinity, as its intelligible, and natural, and practicable doctrines.

Sprat is saying that we should not be concerned that empirical science draws attention to the material and sensual at the expense of the spiritual, such as their critics proclaim. This is because it is the spiritual vices, not carnal vices, that are of greatest concern in these current times: ‘The medicines for religious distempers must be changeable according to the diseases’ and in this time of ‘violent spiritual madness,’ these ‘enthusiastical time’ requires ‘a more sensible prescription,’ which is ‘the contemplation of god’s visible works’ – which ‘next to the succor of divine power is the most probable way to preserve the Christian faith.’

Science, Secularism and Fear

The Royal Society was part of a bigger movement within Restoration Anglicanism which was a movement towards religious toleration, an expanding secularism, an altogether sober approach to religion, a scepticism towards fanatics and an aversion to superstition. Indeed, the sober and restrained character of the English nation, and of their national church, can be seen as arising from this movement, especially when compare to the more lively cultures and enthusiastic churches transmitted to (and still prevailing in) the new world. In the end this movement did not serve to preserve the Anglican Church, whose control over thought and practice withered in the face of science and secularism. Nor did it preserve Anglican Christianity, which is now replaced by an echo of its 17^th century self in a vague humanism. What it did do was allow secular science to flourish in the increasing trust of a society that would orientate its education system in order to propagate the scientific attitude into various disciplines and departments of culture and thought.

This was how it has worked until recently. But now science has a new way of promoting support, a way that is in fact not new at all but borrowed from its near-forgotten enemy. The same motivation that caused panics to sweep across medieval towns and villages, the same old apocalyptic storyline that scared to their deaths young men in the Civil War; such terror is now being used to draw attention to science, to increase its support (and so funding) and to demand obedience to its authority (The time for debate is over, for the science is settled!).  While at its foundation, the Royal Society positioned itself for success in quelling fear with science, it now uses fear to drum up support.

It is true that the Society’s president is not proclaiming divine direction and screaming fire-and-brimstone from a high pulpit. Yet behind the sober and reasonable façade there is the horror of imminent annihilation. Such works as Our Final Century deal with the problems and risks of society with an over-riding theme of fear that is useful only to this purpose of scaring people. Similarly terrifying discussions of risk are found in the speeches and writings of prominent climatologists such as Schneider and Hansen. The Royal Society and its clones support this alarmism. And their official pronouncements, although often less extreme, affect the same purpose. It remains to be seen whether this new strategy in the long run will tend to serve the advancement of science or otherwise serve its demise.

- BernieL

It is the Greens’ wont to abandon all advance of modern civilisation and return us to the Middle Ages!

The Greens want us to abandon civilisation, so it is often proclaimed. In fact, reducing fossil fuel usage and the promotion of renewable energy sources will have no such effect. But nor will they prevent the release into the carbon cycle of all that long-buried carbon. And so they will not stop the marvellous and manifold slow-burn that on the one hand keeps modern civilisation purring along, while on the other hand (so they say) is slowly destroying it.

The reasons that the release of all this buried carbon will not be stopped with the implementation of climate change policy are mostly technological: no renewable process is even close to substituting for base-load coal-powered plants; there is no renewable substitute for the high energy mass transportation arcing across the globe day and night burning avgas; neither for base-load nor transportation are we even close to a carbon-capture burning process; nor is anyone daring to tell the Saudi’s to plug their oil wells and get back on their camels.

Thus, all and any action on climate change that has been placed upon the table for serious consideration will only ever slow down the release of the buried carbon, and so only slow the warming by a few decades or so. Otherwise we can say (if we permit a little poetic licence) that indeed we should say good-bye to modern civilisation …and back to the Middle Ages we go…

The easily discernible mismatch of the policy rationale with the outcomes of the proposed policies has prompted many attempts to explain the (coalescence of) motivations otherwise. Indeed, some Greens do have a hippy-ideal of a semi-subsistent agrarian future, however impractical such a transformation of our cities – our civil-ization – might be. A more moderate explanation is that renewables are a good thing for other reasons (environmentally, politically), and that this AGW scare (consciously or unconsciously) serves but to facilitate our inevitable transition to them. More sinister is that vested interests (in more nuclear power, more taxes, more power to the environment industry etc) are harnessing and exciting genuine concern in a Baptists and Bootleggers kind of way.

**************

James Fleming as he appears on his Classic Articles site (link)

However we may come to understand what is going on in this controversy, we can always return to the fact that the AGW scare is grounded in an argument giving that, by way of the environment, civilisation is impacting profoundly upon itself (even upon its civilised appreciation of the beauty of nature). This is familiar to us in the pollution campaigns of the 1960s and 70s, but it does pay to go back much further than this and compare the current movement with earlier episodes of western environmentalism during previous centuries.

One of the rewarding features of Fleming’s Historical Perspectives on Climate Change comes where Fleming draws our attention to the all-but-forgotten environmental debates of these past centuries, where climate also came into play with claims of civilisation’s affect upon civilisation. Fleming gives particular attention to the 18th century debate of, and mostly in, the America colonies, where many scientists and learned gentlemen were persuaded to the idea of anthropogenic climate change. The difference with today is that the effect was seen as not global but local, and (at least in the debate Fleming cites) moderating and beneficial. Civilisation had a civilising effect on climate.

Yes, we have been through this all before! Differently we travel but across the same terrain. And herein is the redemption the historical perspective affords: whenever you get sucked up into the novelty of the present, the history comes up sobering, grounding. It is to Fleming’s credit that he began to dig under the surface so early, and went to press with this major study in 1998, even if this was too late for AGW’s political triumph at Kyoto.

This is not to say that Fleming presents a sceptic’s view. On the contrary, as we shall see, and like Spencer Weart (reviewed here), his primary interested in explore the history of climate change science is to trace the history of the discovery of AGW. But nor is Fleming a toady to the Warmists. And he presents his book against any historiography fawning to the present dogma.

Not only does Fleming takes the history back further than Weart, and beyond the CO2 story, but at the latter-end he is more cautious about interpreting recent events. Where Weart ends his 2003 edition with the (now tarnished) triumph of the Hockey Stick Graph just two years earlier, Fleming choses to conclude his essays a generation back in 1958 – the very year when empirical climatic research was transformed by a massive funding boost prompted with the pronouncement of the International Geophysical Year. Thus, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change winds up well before the warming alarm emerge from the rabble of global environmental concern in the 1980s; that is, well before the IPCC was born and the expression, ‘Climate Change’, meaningfully contracted as the new catch-phrase to define our imminent self-imposed climatic catastrophe. In this way Fleming gives not so much a history of Climate Change Science but rather he offers some fresh perspectives by invoking its pre-history.

Fleming does not leave the recent anthropogenic debate entirely alone, but where he touches it there is more than a hint of cautious diplomacy. Consider how he introduces the short epilogue, ‘Global Cooling, Global Warming,’ by offering ‘only the briefest sketch of the global cooling scare after 1958 and the return of the global warming discourse in the 1980s.’ Here a break in the rhythm of the sentence draws attention to the use of ‘scare’ to describe one, but not the other, fluctuation in sentiment; and so prompting the question: Will historical hindsight reveal the current ‘discourse’ as but another of these ‘scares’? Then, in a rare personal note he recounts how he was once asked after a seminar: As a historian, could you predict the eventual demise of today’s global change discourse, since there have been so many changes in the past? He responded that while history can provide new perspectives, it has no predictive power. ‘History‘ says Fleming ‘is first and foremost the study of change.’ He continues:

For students of global change, history can serve as an inspirational story of how far we have come. It can also serve as a humbling reminder that change is indeed inevitable in our lives, in the Earth systems, and in our ideas and institutions.’ [129-30]

In other words, it is up to the reader to decide how to interpret and evaluate the present in terms of the past. Perhaps this is why I can agree with Mike Hulme in not much else (see here and here) but that on this topic Fleming’s remains the finest single account. His coverage of the greenhouse story in a set of distinct essays on Fourier, on Tyndall and Arrhenius, and on Callendar and AGW debate of the mid 20th century (titled: ‘Global Warming?‘), is exemplary (and note also his Biography of Callendar). This is much less of a valedictory speech than we find elsewhere, and indeed I would not do these stories justice by recounting them here (and anyway much of this ground is already covered by my review of Weart). The same may be said for his concise account of the development of early global weather data collection networks. Instead, it afford a more interesting discussion for us to cast the sceptical gaze over Fleming’s account of the emergence of competing theories of climate changes and their impact on civilisation. In that way I hope Fleming and I together can offer the reader new perspectives on the current controversy over civilisation’s impact on climate (as per the remit of IPCC Working group I) and climate’s impact on civilisation (Working Group II).

Environmental Determinism in the Enlightenment

Fleming begins his exploration of western climate science with Enlightenment ideas about the influence of the environment on the character of man, nation and culture. Among the 18th century literati there is a strong current of what we have come to called ‘Environmental Determinism,’ and here climate often takes centre stage. The quality of the air, whether damp or dry, stagnant or fresh, influences the character and behaviour of the people who live there, and this reflects the level of civilisation they tend to attain. In good climates the physical man and civilisation thrive, while in poor climates then are underdeveloped or diminishing. Thus, Europeans travelling to the new world were cautioned on the detrimental effects of poor climates, or of climates alien to those in which their nation grew and thrived. What exactly is going on here? What is driving this thinking?

It is difficult to answer these questions when this discussion is taken out of its milieu. And we should pause to consider the ideological context because it continues to influence later debates as we move into science that is more recognizably modern.

In the Christian tradition there are two ways by which we can explore our connection to the divine source, inwardly through the spirit, and outwardly through our bodily experience of the divine creation. That the empirical science movement of the late 17th century emphasised the outward much more in dogma than in practices is well demonstrated by the promotion to the Anglophiles of France of a Newtonian physics (with its grounding in the inward principles of mathematics) packaged in John Locke’s extreme empiricism (All from the senses! There no innate ideas! Outward). This contradiction between the propaganda of science and its actual practices is one of the tensions at the heart of what became known as the Enlightenment, and we still feel it today. The problem of man’s place as observer and of this observer’s very being in this divided science is another tension of Western thought, the history of which goes back at least to Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s ontological ground in his pure mathematical forms.

During the brief Florentine Renaissance, the young Count Pico della Mirandola had come up with the idea that while in the hierarchy of being man is based in his bodily nature, his psyche places him between the physical and the angelic. And so while he could tend either way, his divine purpose is to wilfully uplift himself towards the angelic realm. This kind of thinking is behind notions of cultural advancement in the Enlightenment, including hierarchies of culture from primitives (close to the natural state) to the city cultures with their contemplative scholars (close to the divine). With his doctrine of predestination, Luther (and Calvin) had rejected the renaissance idea (of Pico, Erasmus etc) of our wilful freedom to determine our own destiny. While Romanticism would not so much as attack this hierarchy but engage with it anew.

Now, if we return to what is now called ‘Environmental Determinism,’ we find that it is mostly about how our creaturely nature is fundamental to our way of physical being. Fleming quotes various proclamations of an extreme climatic determinist, a little known Frenchman, Espiard, as giving that the climate is the most fundamental cause of  national character. But if Espiard were a Huguenot then he is not giving it away here, and we should be careful not to take Flemings use of ‘determinism’ too strongly, especially given its usual derogatory connotations. Fleming does not mean that these determinists give that the environment is the only influence on the race, nation and culture, nor that mankind is entirely a prisoner of its influence. This becomes clear in his section on Montesquieu, who is introduced as the most famous and influential environmental determinist of the Enlightenment. But his determinism is undoubtedly qualified:

While for Montesquieu climate was the first of all the empires, it was not the only one. Human ingenuity and effort in areas such as education, government, medicine, and agriculture could overcome the negative influence of climate.

For today, we might add to this list what we now call ‘climate control,’ that is, heating and air conditioning! Sounding more like Pico than Luther, Fleming gives Montesquieu the last word:

Man is not simply subject to the necessity of nature; he can and should shape his own destiny as a free agent, and bring about his destined and proper future. [p17]

Anthropogenic Climate Change in the 18th Century

It is in his discussion of the climate debate of colonial North America during the 18th century that Fleming properly addresses the early debates over anthropogenic climate change. The story goes that, because the colonies had gained a reputation of harsh climatic extremes, apologetics developed to counter these perceptions. One of these was to concede that, while indeed the climate had been harsh for the pioneers, it was now moderated and moderating due to the influence of civilisation. Fleming:

Responding to early disillusionment and the contempt of the European naturalists, they firmly believed that improvements wrought by settlement – clearing of forests, draining the marches, cultivating the fields – were causing rapid and dramatic changes in the climate.

It is mainly by the replacement of the (dank and gloomy) forests with (open and light) cultivation that the climate is becoming less harsh, healthier for the body and better for farming. Fleming shows how this doctrine – promoted by scientists and in scientific publication upon (fragmentary) evidence of (dubious) causations – was most resilient. With its origins early in the 17th century, it persisted, despite sustain attack, beyond the war of independence and into the 19th century, where we find Thomas Jefferson continuing to defend it; in fact his advocacy of accurate and consistent measurement of weather was so as to settle the matter in its favour.

The first sceptic to make significant inroads into this dogma was Noah Webster, publishing right at the end of the 18th century. He not only attacks anthropogenic climate change, but also the very notion that there had been any climate changed at all. Thus, not only was he facing up to the anthropogenic theory of Jefferson and other patriots, but also against the fame of Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Comte de Buffon, David Hume, and of late, the Roman historian Edward Gibbon, for their suggesting that the climate of Europe had change since Roman times. (Writing in and around the Little Ice Age, they mostly proposed that the winters must have been less severe in Roman times). Webster attacks their use of historical accounts as supposed evidence of a general climatic conditions, ridiculing their gullibility in generalising from particular and perhaps embellished reports and memories of what is likely exceptional if it be worthy of remark.  His criticism of the anthropogenic hypothesis was not against how farmers might moderate the micro-climate (by introducing sunlight with the removal of trees or by calming the wind with windbreaks), but that he could find no evidence of major climatic change in either Europe or North America.

But then of course in 1799 there was not much evidence to go by. By the 19th century it was a different story, with some substantial time-series of instrumental data now available, and the debate became informed with statistical meteorology. The meteorologist Charles Schott compiled charts of rainfall and temperature going back nearly 100 years and used these to show no permanent change in the climate. (It is interesting to note here that the increasing heat of expanding towns was in fact one local anthropogenic change that sceptics conceded, and this was altogether uncontroversial, whereas now its has become controversial, not because of disagreement about this local anthropogenic effect, but because its precise magnitude is critical for removing a false indication of a global effect.)

Fleming finishes his survey of the sceptical assault upon the supposition of climate change with an article published by Cleveland Abbe in 1889 entitled ‘Is Our Climate Changing? By this stage, what Abbe was called ‘rational climatology’ could conclude that, as Fleming puts it, ‘the old debate of climate change is finally settled.’ The evidence showed that no important climatic change has yet been demonstrated since human history began. For Fleming, the scientific debate was settled and (as his the chapter title says) ‘climate discourse transformed.’ The statistical meteorologists had completed the shift from literary to empirical studies of climate, from impressionistic evidence to statements of fact, from dim apprehensions to a recognizable modern climatology. [p53]

Indeed this shift was a significant advance towards a more exacting evidence-based science, but was this fledgling statistical climatology advanced enough to settle this debate? Cleveland Abbe had 24 years of climate data from 3 German cities. He admits the problems of variability introduced by instrument breakage, changes in exposure due to vegetation or buildings, observer error, etc. The error that these problems introduce partly contributes to his accounting as insignificant the observed variability of 0.4 degrees. Indeed, but is this or even Schott’s evidence enough to generalisation globally and across all historical time? What is most striking is Abbe’s circular definition of climate as ‘the average about which the temporary conditions permanently oscillate; it assumes and implies permanence.‘

Fleming’s discussion of the controversial emergence of statistical climatology was of particular interest to me for it enlightens some of Hubert Lamb’s ideas on how to explain the resilience, especially among meteorologists, of the dogma of natural climate stability. Lamb cites the unfortunate circumstance that when statistical analysis began in the late 19th century it looked back to the beginning of the record late in the previous century – which just happened to be experiencing a similar climate. He also notes the convenience of the presumption of climate stability for statistical analysis, and how this presumption had allowed meteorologists to take a given period of 30 years, find its average and variance, and them confidently pronounce on probabilities, even of 1 in 100 year events. It is just as Cleveland Abbe says: the statistician’s definition of climate assumes its permanence.

This also explains something else that is striking when reading the history of this science. Unlike Webster, writing in 1799, Schott and Abbe were working during the geology’s extraordinary coming-of-age, when the evidence of climate change across geological time was becoming most persuasive. In fact, by 1889, when Abbe’s article was published, evidence had already emerging that at least 2 but maybe 4 or more waves of glaciation had crept out and back across the northern continents. Cleveland Abbe does in fact conceded climate change in geological time, but not in historical times. OK, let’s leaving Abbe aside for the moment and consider whether historical climate change would have been a reasonable scientific hypothesis at this time. It had long been proposed, and historical evidence (however dubious) had been advanced in its support. Now, with the geology telling of long cycles of cooling and warming, what would be so unreasonable about proposing smaller fluctuation in between? Given the evidence around at the time, one does wonder in hindsight why there was so much resistance to the idea of a naturally fluctuating climate. Only if you begin with Abbe’s circular definition of climate can you be persuaded that the likes of his 4 and 20 years in 3 northern cities can say anything about what was happening to the climate south of the Alps 2000 years earlier. Indeed, there is evidence in the history of this science of repeated and persistent resistance to considering this possibility. And some of this evidence is in the very historiography of the science.

Writing in 2003, Spencer Weart describes how 1965 was the turning point. It was at a conference on climatic change in Boulder Colorado that the interest began to switch from geological change to change in recent times. I don’t doubt that this was true for many of the participants Weart interviewed. But this cannot be the whole story, for where does that place Hubert Lamb’s monumental contribution to the study of historical climatic change? Lamb began publishing his research in the 1950s and it attracted so much interest that The Climatic Research Unit was established with the view to continue and expand this new field. Yet Lamb does not rate a mention in either Fleming or Weart’s histories. Now, if we go back to Lamb’s early writing, we find him in 1959 recounting that the switch to recognition of recent and historical climatic change came about in the 1940s. Indeed, that was surely the horizon of his youthful epiphany. Elsewhere Lamb tells of how (before he made his  own contribution) C E P Brooks’ Climate Through the Ages was something of a standard. In the 1950s Lamb was probably using the 1949 2nd edition. Already in the 1st edition of 1926, and in the earlier The Evolution of Climate of 1922, Brooks tells of yet another sea-change moment. This was an international geological conference in Stockholm in 1910….

There does appear to be a pattern here. Within each generation of researchers the science of natural climatic variation is excitedly rediscovered, only to again slip away. What this repeated forgetting suggests is hard to say, but it does prompt comparison with a similar forgetting of recent times. Natural fluctuations of climate are well remembered in the 1st IPCC report of 1990. There Lamb’s work informs a discussion of the  Medieval Warming, the Little Ice Age and the possibility that some of the recent warming trend could be the continuing recovery from the Little Ice Age. It ends with the warning: it is important to recognise that natural variations of climate are appreciable and will modulate any future changes induced by man [203]. But by the 3rd Report in 2001, with its Hockey Stick and all, there seems to be a move down once again into the cycle of forgetting.

The Scientific Confirmation of Climatic Variability in Historical Times

Exploring this cycle the other way, by taking Brooks’ lead, we arrive at the source. There we do not discover the literary studies of armchaired savants pouring over the impressionistic evidence of fabulous roman histories. And nor do we find meteorologists extrapolating from meager and flawed weather data. What we find instead are small groups of Swedish, Austrian and American scientists out there in the field discovering new ingenious techniques for gathering evidence previously thought unattainable.

Gerard De Geer (2nd from left) with Ernst Antevs (right) on an expedition to North America in 1920. Ernst Antevs carried out extensive varve work on the North American continent. (link to source)

Imagine, if you will, this 1910 conference in Stockholm presided over by Gerard De Geer, the discoverer of varves, when he sets the tone with a paper entitled ‘A Geochronology of the Last 12000 years.’  Brooks was clearly inspired by the entire conference, and he presents his entire account of historical climate change as little more than a summary of the papers presented at this conference. Brooks tells us that previously it was generally believed that variation of climate came to an end with the last Ice Age…

…But since the geological deposits undoubtedly point to changes of climate, slight indeed in comparison with the preceding ice-age, but still marked enough to leave their traces permanently written on the face of the earth, the unvarying climate of history is evidently a myth.

He explaining how the supposed beginning of “the period of unchanging climate” has advanced later and later before the attacks of geologists, but then meanwhile a different, and on the whole more logical, view has arisen, which was:

…that the present does not differ from the past, that variations of climate are still in progress, which are similar in kind, though not in extent, to the climatic vicissitudes of the ice-age. [p321-2]

There is much that can and should be said about this research to which Brooks refers, some of it well underway before the turn of the century, but  let us briefly consider one of these scientists, the Austrian, Eduard Brückner, for he also provides a new perspective on the anthropogenic debate.

We have already gleaned from Fleming the emergence of the argument that deforestation and settlement improves the climate, and how this was roundly refuted by the statistical meteorologists. But before these attacks, a second anthropogenic argument had emerged in direct contradiction to the first. It came with a push for the conservation of woodlands. The climatic argument was that forests actually promote rainfall, and it cites a causal mechanism that deferred back to the scientific discovery of the enormous expiration rates trees. (Richard Grove in Green Imperialism gives an extensive account of this theory and its various associations with Romanticism, the origins of the modern environmentalism and with anxiety over a shortage of quality timber.)

Thus, by the late 19th century there are now two competing theories of anthropogenic climatic change directly opposed both in their policy implications and in the effect that deforestation has (especially) on rainfall. And then the statistical meteorologists step in and say Hang On! the numbers are actually showing that there has been no significant change at all. This is how it was when Brückner’s Klimaschwankungen seit 1700 (‘Climate Change Since 1700′) was published in 1890. Brückner sets the scene of this 3-sided debate with a length and sometimes comical review of the research on all sides. Then, finally, he steps in and offers the possibility that they might all be right.

This is how he does it: firstly he dismisses the idea of progressive climate change in one direction only, and replaces it with the idea of climate fluctuations. Then he shows how both sides of the anthropogenic debate are often indeed detecting climatic change, but at different times and in different directions. When they witness wetter conditions locally (associating this either with local deforestation or reforestation) it is because at that time there is a general wetter-cooler climatic change evident across the temperate zones of both Europe and America. And, likewise, for those that find evidence of dryer-hotter conditions locally (upon local deforestation or reforestation), this is because at that time there is a general dryer-hotter trend. And where no trend is found? This is because (as Lamb would note in hindsight) there is no general trend across that time period.

Resolving this debate is only one of the applications of the main argument of what seems to be the first major work ever published on historical climatology. Brückner’s thesis is that the global climate cycles from wetter-colder periods to dryer-warmer periods repeating somewhat erratically every 20 to 50 years. This is supported by evidence obtained by the newly invented techniques for establishing the past advance and retreat of alpine glaciers, and for establishing past levels of lake, as well as historical documents and the instrument data from both hemispheres.

Another pioneer in historical Climatology, Ellsworth Huntington, is not at all overlooked by Fleming, indeed a whole chapter is dedicated to him. However, the treatment is most unflattering, and the discussion of the climatology is almost entirely distracted by Fleming’s unrestrained disapproval of the values apparent behind some of Huntington’s related research. I have no interest here in rehabilitating the reputation of this man, who has indeed allowed his science to be infected by the racial chauvinism of his time, but it would be a travesty of history not to recognise his contribution to historical climatology.

While travelling with an expedition through central Asia it struck Huntington, as it had struck many before him, how some of the very first civilisations lay in ruin in regions that are now desert. The evidence was convincing that these regions had been wetter in these former times. At first Huntington accounted for this by subscribed to the theory of global desiccation: the world has been slowly drying out since the end of the last ice age. But then other evidence, including drowned ruins in the Caspian Sea, pointed to periods in the past that were dryer than today. This led him to the hypothesis of climatic pulsations. Much as the glaciations advanced and retreated across geological time, so too, across the centuries of historical time, we find evidence of milder fluctuations, where the storm zones circling the North Pole advanced and retreated across the margins of the desert zones. When advanced, northern parts can become too wet for agrarian civilisation, but the desert fringes can become optimal for agrarian-based settlement.

A E Douglass, the pioneer of dendrochronology, used his work to try to establish a correlation between climate fluctuations and sunspot cycles

After first proposing this explanation in his The Pulse of Asia (1907) – upon what he later admits was flimsy evidence – Huntington went about collecting data from North Africa, Central Asia and North America…and this lead him to collaborations with A E Douglass the founder of dendrochronology. The tree-ring analysis assisted in the dating of the construction of abandoned settlements in the deserts of North America, but more significant was the analysis of the ancient giant Redwoods of Southern California, which provided a new means for Huntington to identify climatic fluctuations of the semi-arid regions far back through the historical period. And so with Brückner, De Geer, Huntington and others, knowledge of the variations in climate across the Holocene began to develop. And of course, as with the ice ages, many theories of causation emerged.

Free Will and Determinism

Now that we have brought the science of climatic fluctuations back into the picture, let us review this history of Climate Change Science up to where it stood just a century ago. First we had the civilising theory – we improve our climate for the better by removing the forests. The sentiment is that civilising is good for civilisation, and the policy implication is, of course, to continue the unrestrained deforestation. Then, after a while comes the counter-claim that we degenerate our climate by deforestation, that the civilising process can be detrimental to civilisation, and so we should mend our ways to limit deforestation and preserve the forests. The meteorologists step in and say, well, whatever your persuasion, climate change has nothing to do with it, because the climate does not change anyway. Finally there is the theory that seemed, in hindsight and upon the science (to this writer at least), the most convincing; and yet it is also the one that keeps slipping out of the mainstream thinking. This is that, yes, the climate is changing, but no, we can’t control it. Should we wish to speculate that down through the centuries these debates have been driven by those sentiments to which they have affinity, then the sentimental affinity of the two anthropogenic theories, are apparent: the one is in affinity with the pioneering spirit, while the other with the spirit of conservation. But what is the affinity of the one that keeps slipping off the scene?

Brückner, Huntington and Lamb all advance their investigations into the impacts of climate change. And where they do it is not a pretty sight. Climate change is implicated in droughts, famines, plague, barbarian invasions and the decline and death of entire civilisations. It is implicated by Brückner and Lamb in events as late as the Irish potato famine, and wax and wane of the settlement of America. While the settlers in the American mid-west are boasting that rain follows the plow, Brückner is warns that the current climate optimum now driving forward the limits of settlement might soon end, resulting in lots of anguish and pain. The implication of natural climate change theory is that climate will surely shift, and sometimes with devastation implications…and there is nothing you can do about it. Scary stuff. Compare this to the redemption story of the forest conservation: It is getting bad…but we can change it. And isn’t this the same with AGW? Consider the popularity of the idea that we have a CO2 emissions thermostat: We can control the temperature…if only we control our emissions. And this was not some fringe idea dreamt up by some extreme soapbox alarmists, instead it has been promoted by some of the leading scientists, such as James Hansen and Mike Hulme (as discussed here).

The greens don’t want us to abandon civilisation, they just want us all to jump on their redemption train. This desire is so strong that it doesn’t matter if the science doesn’t add up, nor if the policy proposals don’t match the science. Let’s jump on their train for a moment, take up their cry — We can and should control our climate destiny — with all its emotional impetus, and consider how these natural climate change folks appear from this position. They are fatalistic determinists. They must know (as we do) that climate change will cause civilisation to collapse and we look out at them in their denial, with our disgust, as they carry on with the destruction…of our civilisation.

Huntington might have said that climate is but one of 3 main factors shaping the character of nations, and instead of arguing the point, we reject him as this quirky comical bad-guy, as a climate determinist. Brückner, Huntington and Lamb all came to the conclusion that climate and climate change are factors influencing the history of civilisation, and in this way their investigations inform the study of ‘the impacts of climate changes.’  Should not the prognostics of the AGW impacts be something of an extension of this? They are not. It’s all about the modelling. We circle clear of this historical stuff because it serves a story of fatalism where we cannot determine our own destiny.

What this longer view of the controversy might be revealing, is that one of its main drivers is a very base tension coursing deep through our culture: Could it be that this supposed conflict over the scientific interpretation of the evidence has always been defined by our sentimental attachments to either free will or determinism on the question of the fate of civilisation? Perhaps, with this Climate Change Science, modern sciences has degenerated, if not to Savonarola and his redemptive bonfires, then it has returned us to Erasmus vs. Luther and all that…

We can’t determine our destiny, for it’s in the hands of God.

Oh yes we can!

-BernieL

*****************

On this Classic Articles site, James Fleming has assembled a collection of key articles tracing the history Climate Change with an emphasis on Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming.

The Machiavellian Way

It is a truth, not widely proclaimed, that the principle founder of the modern social sciences was the notorious atheist Niccolò Machiavelli. After a change of regime cut short an illustrious political career in torture and banishment from his beloved Florence, he would sit at his desk at the end of his working day and contemplate what made society tick. In particular he wanted to uncover the internal causation of civil prosperity, and otherwise of civil dysfunction and decay. Late-night imagined conversations with the ancients were the inspiration for this marvellous renaissance of social science methodology, where the prevailing institutionalised dogmas were cast not in terms of their truth-value, but in terms of their social effect, their social power. Machiavelli did not use our words ‘ideology’, ‘episteme’ or ‘paradigm’ the way we now do, but he knew as much as Marx, Weber, Foucault, and Kuln, and as much as Goebbels and Mao, that those who prevail over what-is-taken-for-truth, are those who command society.

After his death, the secret and subversive writings of this Ishmael of the Renaissance were eventually sucked into illicit circulation and across the Alps so as to torment both Protestant and Catholic divines, some of whom must have delved the depths of this stark social analysis – we know this from the way they most clearly delineate its dangers. And his analysis of religion is what hit them with the most shocking force.

It was not that Machiavelli condemned the propagation of religious dogmas by the state. Rather, he agreed with the Roman historian Livy, that, in times of peace, the state-institution of religion is the principle means by which social leaders can keep society from tearing itself apart, even allowing it to prosper. But while Machiavelli praised the healthy social effect of the state-management of religions in ancient Roman (at least according to Livy’s fabulous account), he found the management of religion in modern Rome inherently self-destructive and irredeemably decadent.

From his unfettered pen flowed a most unspeakably damming assessment of the church leadership, a stark clinical analysis now well corroborated by our histories of these times. But this was no cause for cheer among the Protestants, for he also attacked the Christian religion itself, for inadvertently promoting this corruption and decadence. Such Christian teachings as turning-the-other-cheek, and the deferred to the after-life of reward for virtuous social actions, these only served to keep the virtuous down and trampled by those who could affect the appearance of piety even as they lost all sight of virtue in their pursuit of their own interested and this-worldly power. This placed in the firing line, as much the Roman cura, also Martin Luther – that once-young conscience-driven activist who had became increasingly dogmatic and authoritarian under the protection of his supporting princes. And so by the 17^th century we find across the European states sporadically ravaged by internecine warfare and trying desperately to reassert their spiritual authority, that this brave Tuscan atheist with his powerful analysis of the real politique won the terrible reputation, as, himself, a diabolical threat to civil virtue and social order.

The idea of ‘the atheist’ in the writings we have from the 17^th and 18^th centuries is far away from what it is now. In all the Reformation disputes over doctrine and rites, it remained inconceivable that anyone could not believe in God and his reward or damnation in the afterlife. Even in the face of the sociology of religion given by the likes of Machiavelli, and later by Thomas Hobbes, the scepticism towards the underlying theology and its moral imperatives – a scepticism call atheism – remained not only unconscionable but also against any possibility of reasonableness. So when it did become conceivable that there were people out there (secret beyond condemnation) who had actually fallen into unbelief, it was inconceivable that they could come to their position by way of reason. If atheism was not mad then it must be evil. There could be no rational atheists, but only moral ones. That is, the unbelievers could only be those unrepentant sinners, perhaps in league with the devil, comforting themselves that there would be no retribution for their deeds.

It is a point of wonder and speculation among historians as to what these divines really thought: Was it really inconceivable to them that one could doubt the-whole-darn-thing, without being either mad or evil? There are those that are inclined to think that for many of these divines it was. So while the social science approach made it easy for those with no vested interest in the state-church dogma to become sceptical ‘free thinkers’ released from its tutelage of their reasoning, these guardians of the divine order, inhabiting a discourse remote due to persecution, were perhaps not so privileged. And in fact such a definite ideological divide (and one is draw to Marx’s analysis of class-based ideology here) is not so strange to us today, if only we turn from the old authority for truth to the new.

In the West during the last half century, state-instituted religion has been usurped by state-instituted science as the ultimate source of legitimacy in contemporary society.* Did we really think that science was so special? That, as its power consolidated, by rule and by method, the institutions of science could resist the relentless pressure of corruption? And there need be no conspiracy and no blame. One of the first comments I recall when Climategate broke was the exclamation (by Steve Mosher perhaps): Hey, this aint no conspiracy, they really believe they are right!

Sure, they might have known they had to massage the data a bit, and protect it from misuse and abuse. But when the FOIA2009 file was unzipped, out tumbled the private emails showing to us all that any reasonable scepticism of the-whole-darn-thing would be genuinely inconceivable to many of the guardians of state-instituted Climate Change Science. Indeed, as much as the past explains the present, the present can enlighten the mysteries of history. The blinding dogmatism that we moderns associate with medieval religion — as so unimaginably foreign, and against which the founders of institutional science fought so bravely to rise above – this has by now, though the triumph of Climate Change Science, come to pervade every major institution of modern science.

Disagreements Permissible, Unmentionable and Inconceivable

We have invoked the muse of the sociological imagination in this blog-post to enable a sympathetic engagement with perhaps the most prominent promoter of social science method in the AGW Alarmism game. And the first thing the sceptical readers need know about Mike Hulme’s recent book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, is that it is not at all about the disagreement we might first think. It is not, as is the interest of this blog, about trying to understand why some scientists could be so sure that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, and why others challenge the scientific grounds of this proposal.

As with the atheists of old, it is untenable, seemly inconceivable, that anyone might reasonably withhold assent at that level. Should we be surprised that the founding director of The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research regards any professed doubts about the need for action on AGW as either due to an ulterior anti-social motive (in league with vested interests), or only expressing an implicit disagreement in values? Like the moral atheists, the moral sceptics need to believe otherwise so as to persuade themselves there will be no retribution for their immoral excesses and their failure to act. At best, the sceptic uses reason to mask what is really a disagreement over values. This attitude to the critic is politically successful because, as with the treatment of the Machiavellian critique, it permits that doubt or disagreement over the-whole-darn-thing may be emptied of all legitimacy, deflected and reverted upon the critic ad hominem.

Consider, that when someone repeatedly puts an argument that is utterly unreasonable, do you start thinking of other reasons (motives) for them proposing it?, I do this, we do this, with family, friends and foe. It’s a tricky business for our egos each time we make such judgements and decide whether to act on them, but we could not function in society if we did not do so all the time. And scientific institutions need to deal with this problem too, which is precisely why styles, procedures and protocols have long been promoted to help dampen such distortions and bring the discussion back to the evidence. Hulme means no harm. It’s just that he has his gaze fixed fast on the Elysian Fields where society embraces Climate Change mitigation (however this might be achieved). And he bravely leaves the solid road of  ‘hard’ science, with its long-established protocols, to take up the precarious relativism of the social sciences so that he can try to understand the disagreements of this controversy. Thus, he takes to the saddle beside Machiavelli and along the precipice of epistemological doubt.

But what needs to be said, and what we show in this blog-post, is that this heroic adventure collapses in a mess of words and deeds. Hulme’s book quickly descends into a confused and degenerate performance of sociological methodology. A victim of his own sloppy practice, unconstrained by the need to appeal to the evidence (or even to take a consistent line argument), he seems unconscious of the way his own judgements of motive and value push his own vision of truth while oppressing others. Towards the end we even spirals off into a fancy for post-modernism! But Hulme’s attempt to escape the gravity of realism is half-baked, erratic and, most of all, unreflective. We need not blame Hulme, but it would be irresponsible not to point to the damage rort by such corruptions of the Machiavellian way.

The main effect of Hulme’s epistemological relativism is similar to other post-modernist abuses of social science method, namely, to permit the freedom to criticise on all sides while hiding your ground from which you criticise, and upon which you might be attacked. So he raises alarmism against inaction, but yet objects to alarmism. (If there is no reason to be concerned, then why act?) He attacks apocalyptic exaggeration, but yet celebrating it as one of the four great narratives of the Climate Change movement. He disagrees with those who say the science is settled, and yet that is exactly what he mostly presumes and partly defends in the oh-so-sure but grossly over-simplified grounding in the evidence of his Chapter 2. Where is his epistemological relativism here? Turning the page to Chapter 3 and we know the hard science approach is over when Hulme opens with the sceptical science of Singer and Avery in what looks like a roughly edited expanded version of the Guardian article previously discussed here. This singular mention of a challenge to the-whole-darn-thing (Climate change is natural – we can’t stop it) is flung into the whirlwinds of the value-based knowledge systems of the mitigation movement – the windy narratives that variously stir the masses into action as they drive across the hard and silent landscape of Climate Change dogma.

Perhaps this is indeed some kind of strategic guerrilla warfare to strengthen the AGW position outside the constraints of hard science protocol. Or perhaps it only expresses the nervous jittering typical of those fixated in a type of adolescent insecurity that graduate ‘theory’ schools tend to prolong and exacerbate. I do not care to decide. But Hulme’s lack of self-reflection has a great advantage for our own Machiavellian purposes. For it frees him from the strained justification for AGW mitigation through its pretended grounding in the natural sciences. This freedom permits Hulme to reveal to us some of the motivational dynamics of the environmental science culture that seems to be driving the Climate Change movement.

We can be grateful for this testimony of ‘disagreements,’ not for what it says, but for what it shows. Hulme’s insider ‘narratives,’ like the Climategate emails, opens a window to Climate Change Science as an ideology that is, to the believer, utterly sincere and undoubtedly virtuous. Such writing provides an opportunity denied us in our fragmentary reading of the past, and so while Why We Disagree about Climate Change is a long and laborious read, it might invigorate the reader to its special importance as ‘living history’ if we evaluate it under a new heading: with help from Robert Burton and Aynsley Kellow we may read it as The Anatomy of Virtuous Corruption.

The Knowledge of Power

The most striking aspect of Why We Disagree about Climate Change is not so much how little disagreement it deems permissible, but the ways it subverts disagreements inconceivable. In the first place this is achieved through the presentation of the indisputable facts of the science –the foundation of the science upon which the dispute is waged. And we find that, whether with calculated evasion or a crisis of faith, Hulme only partially obscures a foundation built of wafers and straws.

We have heard many times in the media the line ‘the science is simple’ with reference to the undisputed fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but in Hulme’s account of the history of ‘The Discovery of Climate Change,’ he does admit that alarm over emissions is only warranted on the basis of the proposed high levels of positive feedback in the climate system. (Of course, this supposed positive feedback has always been kept in dispute within sceptical discourse.) But later Hulme needs to establish the ground of agreement upon which dispute may arise, and this is how he does it:

Many of the disagreements that we observe are not really disputes about the evidence upon which our scientific knowledge of climate change is founded. We don’t disagree about the physical theory of the absorption of greenhouse gases demonstrated by John Tyndall, about the thermometer readings first collected together from around the world by Guy Callendar, or about the possibility of non-linear instabilities in the oceans articulated by Wally Broecker.

What a curious grab-bag! Hulme had already said himself that Tyndall’s main conclusion upon the evidence was that it was primarily water vapour that is keeping the sun’s warmth in. And this conclusion was strengthened early in the 20th century when experiments showed that the infrared bands that CO2 affected would already be all but opaque due to natural levels of CO2, and that anyway, most of these same bands were already blocked due to the nature humidity of the air.

In a 1938 contribution to the Royal Met Society Journal, Guy Callendar discusses the greenhouse effects of water vapour and CO2 before concluding that CO2 emissions are contributing to the recent global warming.

This is what the amateur Guy Callendar challenged in the late 1930s with his revival of CO2-forcing, now as an anthropogenic effect. And that is what was in dispute with his Met Office critics after they called him in to make his case.  (The reader can find this in Fleming’s history [review], commended by Hulme in his Further Reading as the finest single account.) So then why is Hulme on about the undisputed facts of Callender’s collected ‘thermometer readings‘? We know that in the 1960s with a new set of data the Russians (Budyko after Vinnikov) only roughly matched Callender, noticeably giving his temperature peak after 1900 as now in the decade before. And in the 1980s, with new data and new analysis, James Hansen removes a northern bias that had previously served to exaggerate the 1970s cooling.  But Hulme surely knows that not Callendar, nor Hansen, nor Al Gore, not anyone has yet found the global armpit by which a thermometer reading can establish the presence of a global fever. [more on global temp graphs]

The marginal direct contribution of CO2 to the predominent greenhouse warming by water vapour has never been challenged since Tyndall. Experiments before Callendar established it could make some contribution around the 4 and 14 microns bands of the IR part of the spectrum. The graph above (click to enlarge) is derived from experiments in the 1950s. This is the 'simple science' that is not in dispute. However, IPCC projections of runaway warming proposes that the CO2 warming triggers a net positive feedback.(source: http://brneurosci.org/co2.html)

Thermometer readings alone say nothing about the point at issue, namely how much the whole globe is warming; and the dispute running hot at the time of his writing was about selection, adjustment, homogenization of these readings. Most curious is why Callendar is not listed here for his fame as the first to propose that much of the recent warming is driven by CO2 emissions. Perhaps this is because the IPCC consensus is now that this CO2-forcing only kicked in after the cooling of the 60s and 70s – that is, after Callendar’s theory fell victim to the snowy winters of the early 1960, and after Callendar was dead.

If Hulme is sincere in this proclamation of what ‘we don’t disagree about,’ then he reveals himself ignorant in his chosen field of expertise, pretending to knowledge, but only swimming around a surface of propaganda. Could it be that he, like our divines of old, is dogmatically immunised from the reasoning that might lead to doubt about the-whole-darn-thing? This is how it appears however much I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But then consider how he finishes with the possibility of non-linear instability in the oceans. With the qualification of ‘possibility,‘ this statement is reduced to the trivial. Trivial but indisputable. Yes Dr Hulme, I agree, it is true: The oceanic oscillations might suddenly flip into chaotic fibrillation and we might all die! To all appearances this ‘agreement’ is included to advance scare-mongering on a spurious appeal to established facts. If we dismiss the idea that Hulme is but a victim of dogma, then we are drawn to the conclusion that here is yet another example of an AGW alarmist knowingly distorting and obscuring the facts of science (including here the facts of history) in order to advance his virtuous cause. He means no harm: like the divines of old, he wants to save us from the sins of our excesses. But in doing so he effects a travesty of modern science.

Another insidious way that Hulme affects the subversion of disagreement is the distortion of language used to describe the very debate. We are already familiar with this in the loading of the term ‘Climate Change’ as a contraction of runaway-anthropogenic-global-warming. With this contraction the previous study of geological and historical climate (or ‘climatic’) change, as a natural phenomenon, is subverted. Hulme tells us that the first book he read on climate change was Climate Change: Present, Past and Future, which was the 2 volume magnum opus of Hubert Lamb, one of the great founders of historical climate change research, and the founder of the Climatic Research Unit where Hulme later came to work. While Hulme has interpolated ‘Change‘ into the title of Lamb’s book, it is indeed implied, but what Hulme does not tell us (nor Wikipedia after Trevor Davies) is that Lamb remained publicly sceptical of the theories of human-caused global warming, present, past and future, right up until his death in the late 1990s.

Without as much as a backward glance, Hulme comes to define ‘climate change’ as:

…a past, present or future change in climate, with the implication that the predominant – but not exclusive – cause of this change is human in origin.

Consider firstly how we hardly even notice these days that this definition includes the anthropogenic effects on local climate, such as urban warming. Acknowledged in climate science from its begins, the difficulties in isolating the Urban Heat Island effect on thermometer readings is a problem that has always plagued attempts to find a global signal in these readings across times and spaces of massive urban expansion. And then we must wonder at Hulme’s exceptions to human causation…Could he be thinking of the cooling in the 1960s and 1970s? Perhaps the warming from the 1880 to the 1930 as per Callendar’s temperature graphs? And what about the Medieval Climate Optimum that he read about in Lamb? Finally, as already noted, Hulme implicitly restrains this meaning even further, for the disagreements about ‘Climate Change’ are only about its mitigation.

How Hulme really imagines the climate works is forever hard to pin down, as there are so many shifts in his musings over opinions and ‘narratives.’ But Hulme really does seem to be one scientist who upholds the notion found in policy documents that if we have control over emissions then we have our hands on the global thermostat. He does not ask what are the benefits of reducing emissions but: What are the benefits of keeping global warming to 2 degrees rather than 3 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures? And later he does not call for some kind of international EPA to deal with atmospheric pollution, but instead asks Who Governs Climate? Global climate is now widely seen to be in need of some form of governance.

Hulme is forever subverting the question of Whether runaway AGW? with How to deal with it? and sometimes in ways that seem truly unconscious. Consider this: Quite radically different prognoses for addressing climate change emerge depending on what value system is adopted. I think he means: ‘Quite radically different ways of addressing climate change emerge depending on what value system is adopted.’ I think he means that because that is a major theme of his book. But by misusing ‘prognosis’ (or by inserting addressing), the question of Whether runaway AGW is the prognosis?, this is again subverted.

Next we come to the way Hulme subverts disagreement in blatant abuses of the social science method. This is mostly by an inconsistent and ambiguous use of post-modernist value-relativism which allows him to land some sharp value-laden barbs. A most striking passage comes within what at first appears to be a discussion of Climate Ideology from a neutral point of view. The section begins by saying The idea that the character of different races is shaped, or even determined by climate has been one of the more enduring in the intellectual history of climate. Here I am thinking of how I was taught at school about why the North Africans were tall and dark, why the Mongolians had almond eyes and the Sherpas large chests. But no, this section is called Racism, and he is referring to the climate determinism fashionable in the 19^th century colonialism that served to legitimate domination and to reinforce negative cultural stereotyping. Oh yes, we all find that shocking don’t we. Sure this is old and naive he says but yet the deterministic philosophy underpinning such thinking can still lurk near the surface, and he then cites some contemporary research to insinuate its racist motivation. What I learned here is that I should never mention around the Tyndall Centre my love for the calming cultural influence of the practice of siesta in the warmer climes, nor the difficulty folks seem to have in undertaking book work in oppressive heat, and I would certainly not mention, even with a wry smile, Mike Moore’s theory that we have the air conditioner to blame for the rising influence of Southerns on the USA political scene.

This is scholarly political correctness at its worst, grounded, as it so often is, in a comic book understanding of intellectual history. And even that, he sometimes gets terribly wrong, like when he quotes the racist Kant in 1775, and placing him as the father of the Enlightenment. I wonder where this puts Voltaire and his English Letters of 1733? Or Diderot with his Encyclopaedia? It is curious that Hulme had just mentioned David Hume, for Kant famously claimed that it was the scepticism of David Hume that awoken him from his intellectual slumber. Perhaps there is a lesson for Hulme here, for this section of the book expresses a lazy prejudicial scholarship that one could only excuse if we found that it arose unchallenged from the stupor of a tropical afternoon.

We might at first think that for Hulme it would only be the views of the sceptics that are beyond reasonable assent – and so attributable to ulterior motives. But he seems to have a similar attitude to those on his side whose claims of the science are more alarming than his. In a chapter called The Communication of Risk, under the heading of Linguistic Repertoires, he draws quotations, by way of example, from two scientists (Risbey and Read) where they both clearly say that by raising the alarm of ‘climate catastrophe’ they are calling it as they see it. For them the prediction of ‘climate catastrophe’ is not rhetoric but science. Hulme will not allow this, and he effectively accuses them of exaggeration and lies. In a boxed section he quotes himself (referring presumably to the IPCC scenarios he helped compose):

The IPCC scenarios of future climate change…are significant enough without invoking catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioural change.

Hulme does not criticise his fellow Alarmists because it is unethical for scientists to exaggeration or lie about the science, but because this level of alarmism is ineffective in persuading the masses to action. Later, in criticism from which he does not exclude himself, he suggests that the construction of Climate Change as ‘the mother of all problems’ might have been a mistake, and that in doing so perhaps we have out manoeuvred ourselves. It seemed to me that he had just performing such a ‘manoeuvre’ himself…before a quick change of tack. But for some folks I know, they are saying it is the mother of all problems because that is how they see it. For many of my greenie friends, when they say so, this is no manoeuvre, it is just speaking the truth as they understand it – or as they have trusted that the expert scientists have seen it. They follow Hulme in rejecting Lomborg’s proposal that it is only one problem among many because they have been told by the trusted scientists that it is paramount. Now Hulme seems to be telling my friends that they are the foolish victims of scientists pretending to the authority of science, while in fact deceiving them with propaganda.

The Prince of Climate Change

In the final post-modern flourishes at the end of the book Hulme outlines what he sees as the 4 ‘narratives’ of Climate Change: Lamenting Eden (nostalgia); Presaging Apocalypse (fear); Constructing Babel (pride); Celebrating Jubilee (justice). In explaining how these ‘myths’ manifest in the Climate Change discourse, Hulme has some strong words to say against those nostalgic for a return to Eden, and against others for wanting to building a Babel of climate control (Geo-engineering? — forget it!). But there is no mistake that he comes down mighty hard on those drumming up fear of an Apocalypse. As I read this — his so-called ‘religious’ approach to the discourse of Climate Change — I was rather thinking that he had anticipated some of my own analysis, namely that through Climate Change Science, the institutions of science have been corrupted by precisely the sorts of ‘narratives’ that they first explicitly fought to exclude [see here]. But then, as unexpectedly as it began, the storm of criticism dies down and all is forgiven. In the end he does not condemn the contamination of scientific discourse by such distractions. Instead he celebrates them:

It is stories such as these – embodiments of ‘fundamental truths about our assumptions of reality’ – that we need to re-create in our world. Climate change offers great story telling potential. The four myths I have offered should not be judged as either right or wrong. They should be recognised as stories about climate change; as mirrors that reveal important truths about the human condition [p.358].

We have erred, according to Hulme, in that we have until now considered climate change a problem to be solved, and thereby been too concerned with striving for a solution.

…climate change [is not] a problem waiting for a solution, any more than the clashes of political ideologies or the disputes between religious beliefs are problems waiting to be solved….Rather than asking ‘How do we solve climate change?’ we need to turn the question around and ask ‘How does the idea of climate change alter the way we arrive at and achieve our personal aspirations and our collective social goals?[p.xxviii]

And so…

Rather than catalysing disagreements about how, when and where to tackle climate change, the idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change but to ask what climate change can do for us. [p.326]

Our professor of Climate Change sees, just as we do, the discourse of climate change invading ever discourse of our lives:

Climate change is everywhere. Not only the physical climates of the world everywhere changing, but just as importantly the idea of climate change is now to be fond active across the full parade of human endeavours, institutions practices and stories.

Writing as he does at its peak of influence (2008-9), he wants to promote and celebrate its rise to hegemony:

Climate change should not be seen as an environmental problem demanding a technical solution …we need to approach climate change as an imaginative idea, as idea that we develop and employ to fulfil a variety of tasks for us.

And…

Climate change thus becomes a mirror into which we can look and see exposed both our individual selves and our collective societies.

As the book drew me towards its giddy climax, I was rather overwhelmed by the idea that we had taken off to some marvellous place where what Hulme calls climate change (lower case – the physical problem) did not really matter any more. In this ideal principality called Climate Change (title case – the idea), apocalyptic frenzy is something of which we might disapprove – but, fabulous as it is, we should certainly not challenge it with the facts. Our author had surely conquered the hard sciences with all their pretensions to power in the truth. And he has done this, not with the least penetrating Machiavellian analysis, but through bold Machiavellian political pragmatism.  On closing the book there was no doubt in this readers mind that Dr Hulme had established himself as a Prince of Climate Change Science. With his success in rhetorically neutralising the destabilising influence of the sceptics doggedly appealing to the evidence-base, in his very practice of science, Dr Hulme has mastered the art of politics formulated by Machiavelli in his famous handbook for princes all those years ago.

– BernieL

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*Quote from the Forward by Steve Rayner

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There is much more to say about Why We Disagree…,and I hope to continue the discussion, either in the commentary below, or with a further post discussing such things as Hulme’s encouragement of the confusion of science with policy, and also his confused discussion of Risk. – BL

[UPDATE: See brief discussion of Hulme on risk in this comment on WUWT]

[18 & 25 July 2010 - corrections and minor modifications to the original post]

Climate Change Science as it is known today is a very young science. Many of those that first raised the alarm about our bringing upon ourselves catastrophic global warming, like Schneider and Hansen, are still with us today. In the late 1960s and 70s concern was mounting about the possible local and then global affect of pollution on climate, including cooling and warming. But it was not until the 1980s that the alarm over carbon dioxide driven warming really began.

Of the most recent past, can one really write a history? The closer an account of events moves towards the present the more recedes the special virtues we seek in history, and so it is hard to pick out which recent developments really matter in the long run. With such caveats Spencer Weart begins the final chapter of his The Discovery of Global Warming (2003), but they might just as well apply to the entire subject, and this is all the more so from the sceptic’s point of view; for the question of want has been discovered, if anything at all, may well be revealed to all in good time.

But in different ways for the advocate and the sceptic, the subject is too important to leave alone. For Weart, it is by tracing how scientists, politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens pushed and pulled at one another in the past, we can be better prepared to deal with the fatal issues that confront us.  Whereas for the sceptics, the value in examining the history of the global warming scare is to discover just how it was that this came to be seen as a fatal issue – threatening no less the survival of humanity – so as to understand the phenomenon of alarmism as it manifests in modern society (see eg Scared to Death by Booker & North).

At this blog, our particular interest is in how this scare was manifest and propagated by scientists, and through the great institutions and organs of sciences, upon a grotesque distortion of conventional scientific practice. And one thing that is well demonstrated, acknowledged and even promoted in Weart’s history is that the development of the science (and so its corruption) is almost inextricable from – in fact it thrived upon – the very scare it generated across the politique.

********

The Discovery of Global Warming story begins by taking us back beyond the doomsayers of our time, to the early 19th century, when the French scientist Joseph Fourier discovered that it is greenhouse warming – the trapping of heat by the reflection of infra-red radiation – that explains the retention of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere. Next it was a contemporary of Darwin and Lyell, John Tyndall, who measured the reflective qualities of specific gasses, only to find that the main atmospheric gasses, oxygen and nitrogen, were transparent to this radiation, and so performed no such reflective warming. Tyndall soon discovered methane and CO2 to be greenhouse gasses, but as there were only traces of these in the atmosphere it could not be these that are keeping us warm. Soon he had the answer, that it is in fact water vapour that is the predominant greenhouse warmer of our planet. So, by the late 19th century, with the greenhouse life-nurturing effect of our moisture-laden air well establish, the next question was of climate stability and the cause of its known variation.

Right up until the late 1960s, if you were discussing the question of ‘Climate Change’ you would most likely be considering one of the great questions of geology, namely, What caused the Ice Ages? In fact, Weart identifies a 1965 conference in Boulder Colorado on ‘The Causes of Climate Change’ as a turning point. At a conference convened to discuss paleo-climate variation across millions of years, the discussion noticeably shifted towards contemporary change and the human influence. Weart shows us just how much the contemporary discussion of prospective climate change emerged out of discussion of climate change across deep geological time, and in various ways he shows how the one discussion explains characteristics of the other that are otherwise perplexing. One of these is the eagerness to confirm processes of positive feedback. This grew out of the need to explain the large shifts in climatic condition that caused the advance and the retreat of massive ice sheets, when it was found that the candidates for their causation could have only affected much slighter perturbations.

In the 1870s James Croll proposed that variations in the earths orbit (as noted in the procession of the equinox) could trigger Ice Ages. As he saw it, these changes in themselves were not sufficient to cause the dramatic changes in temperature, and so he proposed amplification by positive feedback due to the greater albedo (reflection) of snow and ice cover and due to changes in the ocean currents. Similarly, in 1896, Svante Arrhenius accounted for inter-glacial warmth by volcanic CO2 causing a little warming….and this causes more humidity,…which causes more warming…and so. Thus, an Ice Age could be triggered by a period of low volcanic activity.

Now consider the problem of accounting for recent climate variation during, say, the last decade, century or millennium. And consider a scientific problematic where we propose solar changes, volcanic influences and other atmospheric changes to cause direct but minor shifts in the global climate, while also noting relatively minor fluctuations (say, + or – 2 degrees) in temperature record of these recent times. In this case we would tend to be looking for feedback that maintained the over-all stability of our climate and dampening these perturbations. However, if we saw it otherwise, with dramatic climatic shifts in these recent times, then we would have a problem similar to the problem of the geological Ice Ages in that we would be looking for positive feedbacks. The point is that alarmists and sceptics sometimes seem to occupy these two different problematics. While in the sceptic camp the former view tends to prevail, the idea of inherent instability in the system pervades alarmist Climate Change Science. It is not so much that they observe great climatic shifts in the climate record, but that they propose the system in a precarious balance easily tipped over into a cascade of dramatic change in the future.

Climatic instability is a theme of Weart’s whole narrative, and we will return to this theme below, but the specific influence of the Ice Age problematic is also evident in his history where it becomes easy to forget (and Weart often pauses to remind the reader) that an influential earlier theory is attempting to explain the slow advance and retreat of gigantic ice sheets, and not the relatively brief and small variations in the global climate of  historical times.

Croll and Arrhenius’s feedback theories of Ice Ages had very different lives and influences. Croll’s orbital theory lingered until a variation was eventually confirmed by the matching of  Milankovitch cycles with sediment and ice core data in the 1960s and 70s. Arrhenius’s CO2 theory was subject to harsh criticism over the next few decades. Some said that Arrhenius had not accounted for the flux of the carbon cycle and the potential for the oceans to absorb the excess CO2. Nor had he considered the negative feedback in the albedo of the greater cloud cover that one would expect in a more humid air. But, as Weart describes, the most damaging criticism came only a few years after the theory was proposed, when it was discovered that CO2 absorbed infrared in much the same band regions as water, thus with the air already opaque to those bands, changes in CO2 concentration could not even affect the small difference Arrhenius had proposed.

It was not until the late 1930s that these conclusions upon simple laboratory experiments were re-examined and found to over-simplify the actual atmospheric effect (see Weart’s discussion of further developments). And so the CO2-forcing argument was revived, but this time not as affected by volcanic emissions, and not to explain the Ice Ages. The interest this time was to consider the impact of the CO2 emissions of human industry, and to explain the creeping rise evident across temperature records which had begun in the 1880s and was continuing through the 1930s.

The proponent of this harbinger of what is now simply called ‘Climate Change’ was not a geophysicist or a meteorologist but a steam engineer who practiced climatology as something of a hobby. Guy Stewart Callendar saw this warming effect of anthropogenic CO2 as desirable, and especially in that it might offset the slow inevitable decline into the next Ice Age. His critics argued that he had not demonstrated the signature of the human impact, and that the more likely explanation is that the recent warming is but an up-cycle of the natural fluctuations in climate evident throughout history. And sure enough, in the 1950s the warming was found to have reversed. After some harsh winters of the early 1960s concern about the cooling world overwhelmed any interest in a warming theory. Alas, after two false starts, the theory of CO2-forced climate change would have to wait for the warming to begin again in the 1980s. Meanwhile, popular concern that the world was cooling during the 1970s, was not, as some have supposed, a beat-up by the media. Rather, it was sourced, as Weart explains, from just such speculation among the scientists.

Weart covers well the quiet and less memorable period of the early 1980s, including congressional hearings in 1981 orchestrated by Al Gore and others, with Schneider and Ravelle giving testimony. In the same year an important AGW paper was published by the newly appointed head of NASA’s Goddard institute, a young James Hansen. While Hansen’s paper made nothing of the splash of his more famous paper and sweaty congressional testimony of 1988, he did win the beach-head of the first global warming front-page report in the New York Times, and this was even follow by an editorial discussing the implications. The political breakthroughs of 1988, including the establishment of the IPCC, coincided with the 2nd consecutive ‘warmest year on record,’ but then the heat was off again, and there ensued another lull for climate alarmism through the early 1990s. This was not helped by the release in 1990 of the remarkably sober IPCC’s First Assessment, which found no conclusive evidence that greenhouse gas emissions were causing the recent warming; warming that anyway had not yet returned us to the balmy heights of the early middle ages.

The IPCC 1st Assessment offered this sketch of the course of global temperature change across the millennium showing warmer times in the early Middle Ages

After all the attention-grabbing drama of the congressional hearings, not the least Hansen testifying his 99% certainty, other activist-scientist (notably Schneider and Haughton) seemed genuinely confounded by the problem of how to argue the necessity of government action to mitigate catastrophe upon the grounds of scientific predictions that are inherently and somewhat irreducibly uncertain. These activists had by this time irrevocably politicised the debate, causing a deepening sceptic/alarmist divide to block the normal to & fro of scientific debate. Here Weart makes no mistake about which side he is on by providing us with the now familiar authority of the peer-view process to support the alarmist science, while questioning the science of the sceptics upon its motivation and its financing. Furthermore, Weart claims that the sceptical arguments that emerged in the public debate at this time were little more than industry propaganda and misleading ‘junk’ science. (Recently, moderates such as Judith Curry have also made similar claim of early scepticism — for her it was 2000-2006 — to excuse the slow acceptance of recent more valid sceptical auditing.)

This depiction of un-scientific trashiness of early scepticism is challenged by a range of documentation from this time. These includes the profoundly scientific grounds for scepticism given by the founding director of CRU, Hurbert Lamb, a case which he developing upon the available evidence from the 1970s through to the 1990s. As for the public debate, there is the well structured scientific case made in the 1990 BBC documentary The Greenhouse Conspiracy. And Weart himself reports further evidence that alarmism has not yet taken hold among the ranks of climate science when he points to surveys of the scientist at this time detecting little restive concern. Indeed, the main narrative of the triumph of Climate Change Science runs somewhat in contradiction to these slurs on early scepticism, for this was still a time when legitimate doubts remained, for we had not yet arrived at the ‘confirmation’ of the science upon which the scientific ‘consensus’ would be built.

The talk of ‘confirmation’ and ‘consensus’ only really began with the triumphant release of the IPCC 2nd Assessment late in 1995. It’s Official the Science journal headline declared, the first glimmer of greenhouse warming seen. The Science article did at least refer to the ‘war of words’ at the final meeting between lead authors and political representatives in Madrid. And it did point to the remaining ‘uncertainties’ behind the headline-grabbing conclusion that the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate. Weart provides no such qualifications. In quoting these same words he reports: It was page-one news everywhere, immediately recognised as a landmark.  And then he glosses the ensuing scandal with an oblique reference to a nasty controversy casting doubt upon the personal integrity of some IPCC scientists. In fact, the controversy was over just how these and other conclusive statements were inserted into the report after the scientific review was complete. The long-sought breakthrough — that the ‘fingerprint’ of the human influence on the warming had finally been discovered — was claimed upon the authority of the yet-to-be-published research of the very lead author who was accused of drafting these modifications during the Madrid meeting.

One must wonder, if these late changes were not made, and the 2nd Assessment was released just as inconclusive as the 1st Assessment, would its fate have been much the same? And then what of the fate of the Climate Change movement at this critical time on the eave of Kyoto? We can only imagine, for the changes were made, and the discovery of global warming was broadly accepted, and the momentum achieved in the winter of 1995-6 was maintained through the political breakthrough of Kyoto, and towards the even more conclusive 3rd Assessment of 2001.

With the release of this 3rd IPCC report, the story of The Discovery of Global Warming comes to its close, but not without giving due emphasis to the startling new evidence of unprecedented recent warming. It had been discovered that 1998 had been not just the warmest year of the century, but of the millennium. And the final chapter, entitled ‘Discovery Confirmed,’ bares witness to just how important was this (now discredited) evidence by the fact that the 3rd and final image of this entire book is none other than Michael Mann’s iconic Hockey Stick graph.

*****

That Weart is writing from within the AGW camp has some obvious disadvantages, but he is not entirely one-sided, and, even where he is, there are interesting revelation. For example, while there is not much discussion of the measurement of global temperature and how it has change and progressed over time, Weart does show how the advocates of AGW progressively dealt with the problem of the apparent fluctuations in 20th century warming, notably the warming up to the 1930s, the cooling of the 1970s and cooling of the early 1990s.

'A remarkable conclusion from Fig. 3 is that the global temperature is almost as high today as it was in 1940. The common misconception that the world is cooling is based on Northern Hemisphere experience to 1970.' Hansen et al, Science, Aug 1981

Hansen’s 1981 paper removes the ‘common misconception’ that the 1970s cooling is a global phenomenon by showing that (as per with the Medieval Warm Period) it was mostly restricted to the Northern Hemisphere (and so attributable to hemisphere bound industrial aerosol pollution). More obscure is Weart’s claim that by the 1990s most scientists now thought it likely that the warming trend from the 1880s to the 1940s, when greenhouse emissions were not yet great, had been caused at least in part by increased solar activity. Indeed, while some were still talking of AGW since the industrial revolution, there was now a retreat to have AGW kicking in only after the 70s – which, we might note, keeps that hobbyist, Callendar, out in the cold. When the 1990s cooling was attributed to the Mt Pinatubo eruption, all that was left to explain was the warming trend across the 80s and 90s, which, by a process of elimination, must be due to greenhouse gas emissions. In recognising the long hard labour to get to this position by the end of the millennium, one can begin to appreciate the frustration of long-time campaigners, when, as the new millennium progressed the warming appeared to stall yet again. As Keith Trenberth famously put it: The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.

Weart is also frank about the funding cycle, and especially how drumming up public alarm causes the politicians to listen and to open their purse to fund more research. War, the Cold War, the Arms Races and the Space Race all drove funding by public fear. He shows how the scientists in the anti-war movement also used the authority of science to drive up fear. In a carefully orchestrated political manoeuvre staged on the eve of Halloween 1983, Carl Sagan, and others, announced the theory of Nuclear Winter, an instant cooling far deeper than an Ice Age that would likely extinguish the entire human species. That the science was tenuous, with all the appearance of pseudo-scientific propaganda, this does not much concern Weart. Moreover, there is a recurring theme in the book that any science that affects public alarm is a good thing, irrespective of its validity and irrespective of the damage a beat-up might do to the integrity of scientific institutions and practices.
This attitude emerges when Weart discusses a catastrophic theory of Ice Age onset offered in the 1950s by Ewing and Donn. They proposed that an ice-free Arctic sea would trigger runaway cooling. As an ice-free Arctic was widely speculated during the 1950s, this theory would be the cause for some immediate concern if it were true. Indeed, taking it on face value, a contemporary US government meteorologist concluded that the human race is poised precariously on a thin climate knife-edge. But despite the enthusiasm of its proponents, the theory quickly fell apart under examination. Weart concludes: Like mistaken data, a mistaken idea can have valuable consequences. Ewing and Donn’s model of the ice ages gave the public for the first time a respectable scientific backing for images of swift, disastrous climate change. Later he writes:

Only a few [climatologists] like Brooks, Ewing, and Donn imagined that the entire climate system might be so delicately balanced that a relatively minor perturbation could trigger a big shift.

The implication is that such scary scenarios are a good thing, irrespective of the evidence for whether or not such instability might be true. And it does make one wonder that if Weart did ever accept that the science behind the Hockey Stick graph had collapsed (he’s not there yet — see this recent discussion), would it be of any consequence, or would he continue to support it as mistaken data nonetheless helpful in raising alarm. Weart does not appear concerned that the hard-won respectability of science might be tarnished by such summary alarmism repeatedly exploiting this respectability for its authority and the attention it demands. Instead, he blames the bad luck of a cooling spell for tarnishing the reputation of Climate Science:

The temporary northern cooling from the 1940s through to the 1960s had been bad luck for climate science. By feeding scepticism about the greenhouse effect, and by provoking some scientists and many journalists to speculate publicly about the coming of a new ice age, the cool spell gave the field a reputation for fecklessness that it would not soon live down.

Later, Weart expresses a similar attitude to the alarmism generated by dubious science when discussing an erroneous computer model (by Moller) that gave a temp rise of 10C with the doubling of CO2. While it caused Moller to doubt his whole theory, Weart says that some (unspecified) scientists found it fascinating…

Was the mathematics trying to tell us something truly important? It was a disturbing discovery that a simple calculation (whatever problems it might have in detail) could produce a catastrophic outcome.

Indeed, many sceptics of climate modelling might agree! If the computer modellers were doing their bit, the world’s image makers have failed to do theirs, for (as Weart writes in 2003) novelist and moviemakers had not given the public a vivid picture of what climate change might truly mean…

The general public was never offered convincing and humanized tales of travails that might realistically beset us: the squalid ruin of the world’s mountain meadows and coral reefs, the mounting impoverishment due to crop failures, the invasion of tropical diseases, the press of millions of refugees from drowned coastal regions.

Of course, the call for more vivid depictions of scary scenarios was soon answered Al Gore and others.

An over-riding theme of The Discovery of Global Warming is that the progress of the science has been the progressive revelation that the climate system is not so stable as we all first thought, but it is instead teetering on the edge of a most delicate balance, and that the improving record of the past reveals more and more that it is yet an erratic beast prone to sudden and wild fluctuations that could, if pushed, be upon us once again. For example, Weart says that when the ice and sediment proxies data became available it showed that the notion of radical climate instability was not absurd after all. Did it really? Evidence across timescales from decades to millennia to geological ages all show patterns of slowly developing cycles of cooling and warming within minor temperature ranges – that is slow relative to the human scale and minor relative to the time-scale. On a human timescale changes like sea level rise, or the descent into an Ice Age remain very slow. What we can say, and this is where some of the confusion lies, is that minor changes, if they were accelerated and unidirectional, then they would cause some significant disruption to modern civilisation. But even these should be compared to the disruption of familiar random/cyclic fluctuations of weather/climate that cause droughts, floods, famines and other devastating natural disasters.

By suggesting that the progress of the science is from an old view of climate stability to the new science of climate instability, Weart suggests that those who’s argument falls to the side of stability are retrogressive, even anti-science traditionalists. During those bad luck cool 1960s Weart applauds most of those experts who began to doubt AGW theory for at least not reverting to the traditional comfortable view that climate was regulated in a stable natural balance. Does this suggest that he regards the drumming of Ice Age alarm better than no alarm at all? Surely an advocate of science should support those who try to stay true to the evidence and not support the science according to whether it promotes alarm over comfort.

Earlier, after recounting Arrhenius’s theory of runaway positive feedback upon increased CO2, and then those objections that drew attention to the negative feedback (like increased cloud albedo), he has this to say:

These objections conformed to a view of the natural world that was so widespread that most people thought of it as plain common sense. In this view the way cloudiness rose or fell to stabilize temperature, or the way the oceans maintained a fixed level of gases in the atmosphere, were examples of a universal principle: the Balance of Nature. Hardly anyone imagined that human actions, so puny among the vast natural powers, could upset the balance that governed the planet as a whole. This view of Nature – suprahuman, benevolent, and inherently stable – lay deep in most human cultures.

We might object and say that the apocalypse of the doomsayer is also a recurrent theme throughout our cultural history, and we should be careful not to let these latter-day doomsayers re-write the history of Climate Science so easily. Weart himself shows that modern climatology emerged out of the plethora of ideas circulating during the time of Arrhenius to account for geological climate change. As for historical climate change, we soon find Brooks from the 1920s, and Lamb from the 1950s, mapping out the patterns of climate change that gave us the idea of the Roman Warming, the Medieval Warming the Little Ice Age, and many more ups and downs in rainfall and temperature. They were not proclaiming runaway change or wild fluctuations, but nor did they proclaiming a perfectly stable balance – for that is not what they found. It is one thing for Weart to support the current dogma that places us on the edge of a climatic tipping points, but his gloss of the commonly held views that preceded the triumph of this dogma appears as something of an extension of the aggressive efforts during the 1990s to erase the Medieval Warming from the millennium record. And there is no suggestion in Brooks nor Lamb that these fluctuations were not disruptive – rather, the disruption they caused constituted much of the first evidence of their existence – although they do both associate the warm-wet periods with prosperity. As for the human influence on climate, well surely it is best to let this case emerge upon the evidence, instead of promoting it as the modern view, or as worthy for the alarm it generates.

There is no doubt that The Discovery of Global Warming is a partisan history, but that is not to say that such histories have no value. Weart tells the story mostly as the partisan and advocate wants it to be told, even as the events are unfolding and well before the drama is complete. In this respect it reminds me of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society written to promote the Society while still in the throes of its tenuous institution in the even more tenuous Restoration. That History endorsed experimental science as a sobering remedy to the apocalyptic ‘enthusiasm’ that had of late torn the fabric of British society to shreds. Now, after three and a half centuries of state-sponsored science, we find The Discovery of Global Warming endorsing apocalyptic enthusiasm to exploit the hard-won respectability that science has earned for its every effort to resist the tendency to depart from a sober exploration of the available evidence.

– BernieL

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Note: Weart has updated the story with a second edition which I have not read. Find additional and supporting documentation on his AIP website, including an extensive and useful bibliography. I hope to post shortly a review of Fleming’s Historical Perspectives on Climate Change.

William Ruckelshaus, the 1st head of the US EPA, acted quickly and against the evidence to ban DDT

This was not the first time that the EPA was seen to be acting on political consideration with little regard for the evidence. In fact, its first significant achievement, the banning of DDT in 1972, gives all the appearance of a political decision against the presented evidence. In this post I want to open up discussion of the links between recent Global Warming Alarmism and the organic insecticides scare of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1971, when the anti-DDT campaign was taken right up to the US Federal Court, it looked like evidence-based science would hold out against increasing popular alarm. After a comprehensive hearing of the evidence in a case brought by the Environment Defence Fund (EDF), and in the face of enormous public and political pressure, the Hearing Examiner, Edmund Sweeney, found only limited endangerment to humans and wildlife by excessive use of DDT, and so recommended against a full ban on its use [40 CFR 164.32].

However, this decision was summarily over-ruled just two months later by the first head of the newly formed EPA, William Ruckelshaus, in a decision that gave every indication there was little regard to the evidence. In fact, it even went against Ruckelshaus’ own testimony two years earlier. In a case brought by EDF in 1970, just before he took leadership of the newly constituted EPA, Ruckelshaus testified that DDT is not endangering the Public Health…

To the contrary, DDT is an indispensable weapon in the arsenal of substances used to protect human health and has an amazing and exemplary record of safe use. . . . DDT, when properly used at recommended concentrations, does not cause a toxic response in man or other mammals and is not harmful. [EDF v. Hardin, 1970]

Later Ruckelshaus famously admitted, in correspondence with the president of the Farm Bureau, that the EPA decisions involving the use of toxic substances are not scientific but political, indeed science…has a role to play but the ultimate judgement remains political (to D Grant, 26 Apr 1979). Ruckelshaus, an attorney and civil servant, approached his decision-making as an attorney with attention to the political implication, and his leadership set the pattern for the EPA – for the next 3 decades his successors were attorneys, with many of their decisions notable for their remoteness from the science and even the views of their own scientists.

Since the DDT decision – and so from the beginning – the EPA has made little effort to uphold the pretence that it is an institution of science, and so it is hardly a scandal when evidence emerges that yet again political triumphs over science (see this recent example). This is why the decision last December on CO2, for good or ill (depending on your sympathies), was generally accepted for what it was – a political decision. The IPCC, which in many respects in an international version of the EPA, has nonetheless strongly resisted any accusations of its politicisation. It stakes its claim to authority on the rule of science – the best scientists assessing the evidence according to the strictest of scientific process. Even as scandalous evidence of the politicisation recently cascaded into the mainstream media, the head of the IPCC continued to declare it the gold standard of current climate science.

The first major scandal over the scientific integrity of the IPCC came as early as 1996, when late modifications to its 2nd assessment changed from inconclusive to conclusive the finding on the single most critical issue – this 2nd assessment report went to press declaring that the ‘fingerprint’ of an anthropogenic component to the recent warming is in fact evident in data (see details of the controversy here). Then, with the next IPCC assessment, came the scandal over the construction of the Hockey Stick graph and its use to demonstrate that the recent warming is unprecedented. And now with the 4th assessment scandals have multiplied over the dubious authority of its claims of the impacts of the anticipated warming on glaciers, on the collapse of the Amazon, famine in Africa, and so forth (See Booker’s discussion).

In all this, it is easy to argue that, despite what it claims, the IPCC is only playing a politicised role much as the EPA. And of recent times sceptics have being looking back on this controversy over DDT for various links with the global warming controversy. In the movement against the new synthetic pesticides, which began in the 1950s and continued through the 60s & 70s, they see an archetype of the environmental alarmism that informed the Global Warming scare launched in the 1980s. Some of this discussion has been very emotive and partisan (see eg the movie Not Evil, Just Wrong – extract here). I want to avoid that as much as we can in a look at the extent to which there is continuity from the campaigns against the use of organic insecticides to the campaign against the emission of CO2. And were there are links, we will be interested in the extent to which they demonstrate a trend toward the corruption not so much of politics but of the processes of science.

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How reasonable were concerns over insecticide usage in the 1950s?

The first issue to raise is the extent to which the alarm was reasonable and justified. That is to say: Was there cause for alarm over the widespread use of the newly synthesised insecticide across the USA during the 1950s?

Consider the case of Thalidomide, a newly synthesised wonder drug of the late 1950s. We now know that its use to treat morning sickness resulted in thousands of birth defects, but before this link was made in the early 1960s scientists were confident that no drug could cross the placental barrier and harm the child. They were wrong. The tragedy lead to the development of stricter testing of drugs before they could be licensed. The USA was spared disaster by a cautious FDA, but no authority, not the least the Department of Agriculture, was so cautious about the side effects of insecticides on wildlife and human life. The Department of Agriculture was helping the chemical companies to promote their unrestricted application to eradicate as many insect pest populations as they were able. And there was only what would now be regarded as preliminary research into its effects before clouds of organic insecticides were drifting over farms and forest, streams and lakes, houses and gardens.

US Military image of the wartime use of DDT

Paul Muller discovered the marvellous qualities of the DDT and its related compounds while researching insecticides for an international chemical company in the neutral Switzerland at the outbreak of WW II.  One of the outstanding qualities he noted was their resilience. And this resilience was a large part of DDT’s first extraordinary wartime success, when occasional dustings down the shirt-front or up the skirt controlled lice among soldiers and refugees. DDT would persist in clothing and on surfaces for weeks even after washing. And this resilience would be important later when DDT would be incredibly successful in the eradication of malaria through the periodic spraying of the insides of dwellings. The war-time importance of such an insecticide should not be underestimated, as Mellanby explains:

From the earliest recorded data, we have known that in war there are far more casualties from disease , including insect-borne disease, than from the weapons of the enemy. Thus during the [Boer War] 35 casualties occurred for every 1 from enemy action. In [WW I] the figures were 9 to 1. [The DDT Story p17-18]

In peace time the new organic pesticides were applied in heavy concentrations and increasing volumes in the war against the insect pests consuming US crops. But this was not the extent of their use. They were also sprayed on forests, roadsides, parks and buildings, and they were promoted for unrestricted use on domestic lawns and gardens. Indeed, these new and resilient man-made poisons were everywhere. And confidence in their power lead to even more ambitious plans. Some pests, especially introduce insects, could be eradicated entirely by ambitious programs involving the aerial spraying of vast areas.

Aerial spraying of DDT for insect eradication

One of the most ambitious of these plans was the campaign in 1957 to eliminate the Gipsy Moth by spraying across 4 states, including heavily populated areas such as Long Island. The following year a similar campaign of eradication was mounted against the Fire Ant across 9 states. And so, millions of American people, homes, gardens, pets, ponds and playgrounds were showered with the tiny pelts of this relatively new and unknown poison, falling in a silent shower much reminisce (as campaigners would not neglect to point out) of the mystery fall-out that would showered farms and towns after the secret nuclear tests conducted above ground during the 1950s. And as with the nuclear testing, this blank spraying was conducted without consultation or redress. And so it was that among the fierce protest against this spraying a new movement of environmentalism was born. This movement held up a flag of caution to the extraordinary optimism of the post-war era, where economic progress and development was promoted as good in itself, and where the advance of science and technology was promote as holding the solutions to all the problems of the past, including the elimination of crop damaging and disease carrying pests.

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Silent Spring and the promotion of ecology

The case against the widespread and reckless use of organic pesticides was consolidated in 1962 by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, and this served also to consolidate the movement. As with Carson’s earlier books, one of the undoubted contributions of Silent Spring was the education of the public in the scientific understanding of nature, especially its ecology. In cautioning the use of these insecticides, Carson explained the interdependence of species; how the elimination of one pest could cause a plague of another, or otherwise the starvation of predator animals or fish, or, more generally, how the killing of one species could upset the balance of a whole eco-system. In order to promoted the alternative use of biological controls, she explained about tiny insect parasites. She explained how poisons could accumulate in the flesh of animals and pass up the food chain and to places far removed from the spray zones. She explained how small populations of rapidly reproducing organisms, such as insects, can evolve rapidly with changes in their environment when she explained the emerging problem of insects developing resistance to insecticides. And in general, with her call for cautious intervention into the web of life she explained to her readers how little science really understood the ecology of the world around us.

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Carson’s distortion of the scientific evidence

Carson, who died shortly after the publication of Silent Spring, did not call for a ban on DDT. She supported targeted poisoning programs in the place of blanket spraying, and she urged the authorities to look for alternative and more clever ‘integrated control’ – much like the pest control strategies common and accepted today. Carson saw a conflict of interested within the Department of Agriculture, with its role to both promoted and regulated the use of pesticides, thus she recommended for an independent body to look to the dangers for wildlife and humans – as we have today. We should be careful not to attribute to Carson the excesses of her followers. But in all of this Carson was careless with her science, and critic, both at the time and after, have compiled long lists of distortions and fabrications of the evidence that she used in order to strengthen her case (see for example here). Historically, the most important area of distortion is the linking of organic pesticides with human cancers.

Carson was right to raise the problem that the carcinogenic effects of a substance may take some years, even decades, to manifest after first exposure, and even then many cases could go unnoticed before the link is identified. She was right in claiming that little was known about the mechanism of causation. We now know that the replacement of the old arsenic based insecticides with DDT was to move from a dangerous natural carcinogen to a safe synthetic substitute, but in Carson’s time this was not so evident. Perhaps this forgives her rhetorical uses the known cancer-causing dangers of arsenic to promote fear over DDT. But this does not excuse her persuasive but highly dubious use of anecdotal evidence to support her claim that DDT is a dangerous carcinogen, that there is no save dose of a carcinogen, and that we are swimming in a sea of carcinogens mostly of our own making.

The title of her chapter on cancer, ‘One in Every Four,’ refers to the claim that the chance of a person getting cancer had recently increased from 1 in 5 to 1 in 4.  She then links this increasing rate of cancer to our increasing exposure to synthetic chemicals during the same period. The inference of the chapter is clear: The reason that there is now a cancer epidemic is because our world has become ‘filled with cancer-producing agents.’  Carson’s distortion of the available evidence is well documented, as is the refutation of the supposed causal link (see for example Chapter 22 of Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist). And so we can now see how, in the case of the cancer scare at least, opponents of the environment movement are justified in claiming that here we have phoney science sparking off unreasonable alarm. This scare would run across 3 full decades and it was not just pesticides that were feared, but it was synthetic chemicals generally that were supposedly causing this epidemic of cancer.

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The similarities of the anti-DDT campaign and the anti-CO2 campaign

There are some striking similarities between the earlier insecticide alarmism of the 1960s and 1970s and Global Warming Alarmism of the 1980s and 1990s. Here we will consider some parallels between the two, especially around the following two unsubstantiated claims:

• that organic insecticides cause cancer
• that CO2 emissions cause catastrophic global warming

A perceived correlation
DDT: As the prevalence of synthetic chemicals has increased so too has the rates of cancer.
CO2: As CO2 emissions have increased so too has global temperature (at least during the 1980s and 1990s).

Evidence of some effect
DDT: There is undisputed evidence that some of the organic pesticides do have a negative effect on non-targeted species and that blanket spraying causes resistance.
CO2: There is undisputed evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

The possibility of delayed effect and delayed detection
DDT: Cancer can take years, even decades, to manifest, and it could take even longer for a carcinogenic link to be confirmed.
CO2: The heat-banking qualities of the oceans, and the temporary dampening effects on factors such of volcanic eruptions and a quiet sun, these may account for delays in atmospheric warming of years or even decades.

Government funding feedback cycle on research
DDT: As the organic pesticides scare developed, grants of funding increased for research into their adverse effects.
CO2: Since the AGW scare began the funding for climate research has expanded enormously and is often actually labelled Climate Change Research (as per the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research).
In both cases it seems that the more the science shows the effect, the more the funding for the science, and so this encourages a bias.

Products of industry associated with growth
DDT: Pesticides are manufactured and used to increase the yield of crops
CO2: Industrial production overwhelmingly requires the burning of fossil fuels and so the release of CO2.

Nasty profit-driven opponent
DDT: The Chemical industry mounted a defence of DDT that backfired and failed despite the fact that the evidence was on their side.
CO2: Global warming alarmists continue to proclaim that the likes of ‘Big Oil’ are behind the sceptics.
Note: When AGW alarmists wish to characterise the motivation of the sceptics they do not invoke the DDT controversy but rather the smoking-causes-cancer controversy. This may be because the position of ‘Big Chem’ might be easier to defend on the science and also on humanitarian grounds (eg, that the campaign against DDT inhibits the control malaria in developing countries) and so that association is best avoided.

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The anti-DDT movement and the peculiarities of USA Environmentalism

A 1947 US government advertisment for the domestic use of DDT

The way the insecticides controversy played out in the USA was quite distinct from how it played out in other western countries, and the power of its influence on the environment movement was also peculiar in the USA. Consider for example that not in Britain, nor Australia, was there anything to compare with the obstinacy and ambition of the Fire Ant eradication program, and nor was there anything to compare with the enormous public backlash. The confrontations outside as much as inside the USA courts was as publicised as it was emotive, and it launched scientists into advocating against industrial interests for nature conservation with the backing of the conservation lobby (aside from the EDF this was mostly the Serra Club, which supported the litigation and commissioned not only Silence Spring but also Ehrlich’s Population Bomb). The success of the confrontational litigation strategy of the EDF had an impact that was simple absent outside the USA. As Kenneth Mellanby puts it in The DDT Story, in Britain the decisions to restrict and/or banning organic pesticides were the result of ‘discussions mostly held in private, though they were not secret and the reports of all the committees were published. The law was not brought in.‘ [p90]

The campaign against organic pesticides is widely regarded as providing the foundations of American environmentalism, whereas, in other Western countries, like Germany, Britain and Australia, environmental movements formed in markedly different ways. In Australia for example, the movement emerged out of a failed campaign, begun in the late 1960s, to save a wilderness lake.

And yet, as with all else American in the 20th century, US domestic controversies had a global impact. The impact of the American environmental movement on the global movement was most strongly felt when AGW Alarmism began to overwhelm all other international environmental issues. Readers of this blog outside the USA may have been as surprised as I was to come up against the Global Warming debate as it is playing out in the USA. There is the evangelical and apocalyptic fervour, not just of Al Gore, by also of the scientist-advocates such as Ehrlich, Schneider and Hansen. And then there is the political polarization of the issue and its frightfully aggressive expression. But what we can also see by looking at the American insecticide controversy is that herein lies an important precedent in the use of phoney science to stir up a scare.

This is why Carson is important not just for environmentalists but also for critics of environmentalism in American. Carson, the Serra Club and then the EDF successfully used corrupt science to persuade an enormous public scare, which the newly formed EPA chose not to ignore. And so the EPA began its life by dismissing the evidences at hand so as to respond to this scare with the extreme measure of  banning DDT. On the American scene, the rise of environmentalism and the corruption of science-for-policy go hand in hand. And so it is understandable that American critics who see climate science corrupted by an aggressive propaganda campaign often view this as but another expression of the corrupting influence of environmentalism generally.

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– BernieL

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Wikipedia provides the conventional understanding of these 11 theses as ‘identify political action as the only truth of philosophy. The final and most famous thesis, the one that would become Marx’s epitaph, is here given to mean that ‘philosophy’s validity is in how it informed action.’

The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach in the original signature of Karl Marx

This last thesis, ‘Thesis 11,’ would become the dictum of the burgeoning cabal of Marxists in the social sciences during the 1970s. They saw their scholarship as revolutionary ‘praxis,’ believing that the underlying validation of their theorising and research was the extent to which it advanced the revolutionary cause. To them, the praxis of science, like everything else, reduced to the political – which is the politics of historical materialism, the mechanism of the class struggle that determines the course of history.

Like the saints of the Apocalypse, with their pens for swords, these academics worked to advance the coming of the New Jerusalem. And so they despised their liberal colleagues, well meaning perhaps, but only serving to perpetuate the reign of the bourgeois with all its contradictions and class oppressions.

The idea that the validation of knowledge is political was a radical innovation in the modern secular university. But it only really took hold in the social sciences, and only until the 1980s. What I want to do in this post is compare this Marxist theory of science with another theory of science now popular in a natural science. This is the Post-Normal Science (PNS) of Jerry Ravetz that I introduced in a previous post, and which has been used to account for some of the peculiar and apparently anti-science features of Climate Change Science. And in doing so, I will be raising such questions as:

• What is the relationship between these two doctrines?
• To what extent does the one inform the other?
• Is PNS something of a new praxis for a new apocalyptic science of nature?

Neo-Marxism: Activist Social Science

It is important to recognise just how radical was this Marxist approach to research. We can do this by comparison with the approach taken by their left-leaning liberal colleagues. Be they chemists or social researchers, academics have long been openly and vocationally committed to their scientific practice so as to advance a social or political cause. They may hope that the effects of their research – whether these be in developing new fertilizers, or exposing domestic violence – will make the world a better place. And, indeed, we may find that their beliefs and motivations bias their conclusions towards what they see as the virtuous policy implications. But they would not avowal a licence to do so, and they would defer to no other validation other than the scientific evidence. In other words, liberalism had no extra justification for breaking with normal scientific validation.

Not so Marxism. In fact, Marxists would often criticise the research and policy advice of liberal academics as only softening the political situation instead of what is needed, namely, to escalate the social contradiction to crisis. At this time many a social theorist, like the great Emil Durkheim, would be labelled a ‘functionalist,’ and scorned – not because his account of society might be wrong, but because it served no purpose but to reinforce the political status quo.

It was these ‘new Marxists’ of the 1960s and 1970s who dragging Marxist scholarship from its open affinity with Soviet-aligned communist parties and with Stalinist Marxism (however belatedly so, for there was overwhelming evidence of the atrocities of Stalinism at least from the mid-1950s). They did not abandon Marxism, but humanised it through a retreat to the young Hegelian Marx, the one who had written those 11 theses all those years ago.

The great Marxist scholar Leszek Kolakowski was something of a leader of this anti-Stalinist movement in his native Poland during the 1960s. But after escaping into the more liberal atmosphere of Western academia, he soon abandoned even this neo-Marxism; and he, as other émigrés, was perplexed as to why his Western colleagues did not do the same. ‘There are better arguments in favour of democracy and freedom‘ he would plea, ‘than the fact that Marx is not quite so hostile to them as he first appears.’ At the end of his monumental 3 volume survey of Marxist philosophy he concluded:

At present, Marxism neither interprets the world nor changes it: it is merely a repertoire of slogans serving to organise various interests, most of them completely remote from those with which Marxism originally identified itself.

Nonetheless, this scholarship-as-activism persisted until the collapse of both academic and soviet Marxism in the late 1980s when many western Marxists fell in with the environmental movement and helped them expand their policy profile to social and economic reform. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a similar doctrine of science, validated as praxis, should emerge around this time in the environmental sciences.

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Post-Normal Climate Change Science

A science is in the post-normal condition when its conclusions are extremely uncertain, but, yet, urgent and drastic decision are dependent on them. According to Ravetz, Hulme and others, Climate Change Science has always been in the red band of this rainbow.

In PNS theory, a science enters the post-normal condition when it is set loose from validation though established truths due to its inherent and irreducible uncertainties. (To understand this theory we must accept that normal science is about establishing absolute truths and that it is intolerant to uncertainty – of course many would dispute this…but I continue…) When normal scientific validation-by-evidence no longer works, this does not mean that there is no longer science, but only that science has entered its post-normal condition, where it is propelled into the political domain, because, despite being plagued by uncertainties, it has urgent policy implication for government (see the rainbow diagram right, and see my next blog for a discussion of policy-based-on-ignorance…but I continue…). For Funtowicz and Ravetz the post-normal condition is most apparent in the environmental sciences. On many a environmental issues ‘“soft” scientific information… serves “hard” political decisions’ ['Post-normal science: A new science for our times', Sci. European, 1990].

The problem for scientists is that they might try to practices normal science in a post-normal condition. To practice post-normal science properly, one must accept the complete politicisation of the scientific processes and accept that the science has moved from an evidence-base to a value-base. Because the evidence is so contested and inconclusive, the position a scientist takes overwhelmingly reflects his/her underlying values. No scientist can claim to be merely stating scientific truths, and so this condition requires and involves non-scientists in the scientific process, who serve to balance the normative bias of the scientists. It is through the value-base political debate that new knowledge is generated and the science advances.

For Ravetz, Climate Change Science is the paragon of PNS. It has never really been a ‘normal’ science. That scientists were constrained ‘to attempt to do normal science in a post-normal situation‘ was the root cause of Climategate. The Hockey Team scientists were fighting off their critics on the blogosphere, whereas if they had only involved them as their ‘extended peer community’ there would not have been this ‘catastrophe‘ of Climategate. This external and politicised ‘extended peer community’ could have maintained the quality of a science where normal scientific validation had become impossible. [WUWT1]

This at least is how Ravetz saw it after the Climate science scandals broke out across this snowy northern winter. His sudden realisation that the blogosphere was offering this corrective role prompted his essay into this very domain with his WUWT1 post. But, prior this, he had a very different perspective on Climate Change Science. And it is this perspective that interests us, because there is concern that the application of the PNS analysis itself might have promoted the corruption of Climate Change Science with activism and advocacy. Given that the IPCC (and Climate Change Science generally) now stands accused of just such corruption, it is of some concern that while sceptics were calling for the de-politicisation of climate science and a return to its evidence-based, Ravetz (and even more so his followers) were using PNS to promote the involvement in the scientific process of stakeholders and activists, so as to balance the bias of the ‘professional elites.’

Now, whether this PNS analysis was explicitly used in order to legitimate the involvement of activist organisations in the development of the science is a moot point. And whether the PNS theory encouraged the IPCC authors to cite unsubstantiated claims in activist publication – and in contradiction to the conclusions of evidence-based science – I have yet to find any evidence of this and it remains for me an open question.

But what is becoming clear is that PNS was used as a tool to discredit critics and sceptics in what would otherwise be seen as little more than ad hominem attacks. This is displayed most publicly and alarmingly in a newspaper review by Mike Hulme of Singer and Avery’s Unstoppable Global Warming. This review was published in March 2007, just after the IPCC 4th assessment was released, and just before Hulme published his own extraordinary and perplexing book on the controversy, Why we disagree about Climate Change. You may wish to read this review before we take some time to consider what the thinking behind it could possibly be.

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PNS Promoting the Politicisation of Science

From the PNS perspective of Hulme 'this book...can be understood...as a challenge to...the values' the authors 'believe to be implicit in the science, rather than as a direct challenge to scientific knowledge'

In the review Hulme tells us that Singer and Avery claim the recent global warming is part of a natural cycle of warming and cooling over which we have no control. And Hulme notes that this contradicts not only the causation given by the IPCC report, but also its prediction that the warming will continue up to 6C by 2100 if no action is taken. Hulme then asks: ‘So is this a fight between scientific truth and error?‘ Well that’s what the authors seem to think: ‘This seems to be how Singer and Avery would like to present it‘ he says, and quotes their book:

..science is the process of developing theories and testing them against observations until they are proven true or false.

But for Hulme this debate is not about testing testable theories at all. And this is Hulme main point – Climate Change Science just ain’t that kind of science.

To begin with, Hulme assures us that the science is already settled on this matter. It is only that scientists are not sure what to do about it ‘and new books such as Singer and Avery’s, or opinion pieces in the Daily Mail, do not alter‘ that fact. Nor should we be deceived ‘by the fact that this book is written as a scientific text, with citations to peer-reviewed articles, deference to numbers, and adoption of technical terms.’ This is because ‘deploying the machinery of scientific method allows us to filter out hypotheses – such as those presented by Singer and Avery – as being plain wrong.‘

So, if this book looking every bit like a book of science is in reality only phoney science, then what are these authors up to? What we need to understand, according to Hulme, is that science undertaken with policy implications is not like normal science, ‘this scientific knowledge is always provisional knowledge,’ and ‘it can be modified through its interaction with society.’

Confusing? Indeed. And if we had not boned up on PNS it would be hard to know what game Hulme is playing here. Whenever Post-Normal Science model is applied to Climate Change Science the underlying fact of the urgency to respond to immanent catastrophe is placed beyond dispute, for this high-stakes urgency is the very raison d’etre of both Climate Change Science and Post-Normal Science. Thus, any challenge to this very ground of the post-normal science of Climate Change is taken merely as an operation of the value-driven activities of this science that is already in the post-normal condition.

And so, after explaining that Climate Change is a ‘post-normal science’ where ‘values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken,’ Hulme is now able to explain why, despite appearances, Unstoppable Global Warming should not be understood as a challenge ‘to the process of climate change science,’ but rather as a challenge to ‘the values‘ the authors ‘believe to be implicit in the science.‘ The authors are using apparently scientific arguments to further their deeper (yet unexpressed) values and beliefs. This is a polite way of saying that Singer and Avery are pretending to do science when what they are really doing is rhetoric – they have built a sophistry to push their own normative or political agendas. For Hume it is a pity that ‘Too often with climate change genuine and necessary debates about these wider social values… masquerade as disputes about scientific truth and error.’

This analysis explains why in the lengthy review Hulme never once considers one single scientific argument used to support the author’s thesis, and why he would begin a review of a book challenging (anthropogenic) Climate Change with these four words: ‘Climate change is happening.’ With that out of the way (or is it? – see below), he can use the PNS theory to explain their motivation, and he can navigate the tricky problem of both accepting the inherent uncertainty of the Climate Change Science while warding off those who use this uncertainty to undermine it.

Only with this PNS perspective are we ‘going to make sense of books such as Singer and Avery’s.”  Hulme continues:

The danger of a “normal” reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow. Singer has this view of science, as do some of his more outspoken campaigning critics such as Mark Lynas. That is why their exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences. If the battle of science is won, then the war of values will be won.

The problem with Singer is that he thinks (or pretends) that the debate is about ‘scientific truth,’ or as Hulme quoted earlier, about ‘developing theories and testing them against observations.’ It’s not about that at all! Because Climate Change Science is post-normal. The controversy is not of (normal) science, but of values, and, in order to progress the science, we should no longer pretend that it is a debate over the science, but we should make it explicit for what it is, namely, a political debate over values.

Hulme even goes as far as to say that the very basis of climate change alarmism is not (was not) settled in ‘normal’ science:  ‘self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.‘ This is in agreement with Ravetz when he says that Climate Change science was never really a normal science. We can only conclude – and it appears that this is what they are actually saying – that this science emerged from a politicised discourse detached from normal scientific validation. They might find some agreement with the sceptics there (!), and also when Hulme advises that ‘in order to make progress about how we manage climate change we have to take science off centre stage.’

Whatever one might say about the validity of the PNS analysis, what is clear is that it serves to take the heat of the problem of the (normal) scientific evidence for AGW by shifting the debate towards the value-base of policy responses to it. By posing Climate Change Science as post-normal, whenever sceptics (such as Singer) try to argue the evidence, Alarmists need no longer argue back upon the evidence, because PNS tells us that what they are really doing is disputing the values inherent in climate change mitigation. This feeds right into the popular manoeuvre to dismiss sceptical science as motivated against the values of environmentalism and against the virtue of collective action to save the world. It could be argued that there is a strategy here barely disguised in the PNS theorising: Climate Change Alarmists recognise that they cannot win the debate over the science, but that they might be able to win the moral debate by identifying support for the Alarmism with environmental values and basic humanitarian ethics.

Hulme’s review, with its gentle advisory that the author’s lack ‘reflective transparency‘ about their own motivations, is perhaps symptomatic of the condition of the Climate Change Alarmism at its dizzy heights of confidence before it came crashing down. He does at least admit that this lack of reflection might also be a problem for extremists on the Alarmist side (including Lynas and Lovelock), and it is even ‘a chink of weakness in the authority of the latest IPCC science findings.’ But what about himself?

The complete absence of any self-reflection in a review advocating self-reflection is truely baffling. If we place the PNS analysis aside, we are left with a dismissal of evidence-based science and a condescending personal attack on the alterior motives of the authors. Indeed, it is symptomatic of the degeneracy of the scientific debate at this time that this, and so many other prejudicial and anti-science attacks by scientists were not shouted down by their science colleagues. Hulme could be confident that only the derided and marginalised sceptics would call him to task for using PNS to discredit their science for its motivation, but as for the non-scientist readers the byline at the bottom of the review nearly gives it away as to the conflict of interest of the reviewer. This review of a book challenging the very basis of Climate Change Science is by a professor of ‘Climate Change’ and founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

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The Affinities of PNS with neo-Marxism

Marx is supposed to have taught that the validity of knowledge is in how it informs action. Does his epitaph live on in the post-normal science of Climate Change?

Just this sort of reflection did finally hit Ravetz after Climategate broke. In his follow-up WUWT post, his answer to his critics, he confessed that previously his own bias was to presume plausibility ‘towards the green side,’ and that for him ‘it was totally implausible…that leading climate scientists could be either gullible or complicit in serious fraud at the core of the enterprise…even when I heard about M[cIntyre] & M[cKitrick] and the hockey stick scandal.’ And:

In retrospect it could be said that PNS, and in particular the ‘Extended Peer  Community’ was conceived in a left-wing framework, enabling little people to fight scientific battles against big bad corporations (state and private) and professional elites.

In other words, the virtuous involvement of activists in the science was necessary in order to match the value-laden interventions into the science of powerful vested interests like the big bad energy-consuming states and the big bad energy industry. In the PNS analysis, the likes of Singer, McIntyre and McKitrick could only be seen as representing these interests. And this brings us back to a consideration of the affinities of PNS with Marxist analysis and specifically the science-as-activism doctrine of the neo-Marxists.

Firstly, consider how easily it would be to make the following substitutions:

• the professional elites are the bourgeois
• normal science is bourgeois science
• the big bad corporations are the institution of the capitalist system.

Back in 1993 Funtowicz and Ravetz introduce their Science for the post-normal age with this opening historical analysis:

Science always evolves, responding to its leading challenges as they change through history. After centuries of triumph and optimism, science is now called on to remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system of which it forms the basis.

They go on to tell us that the science that will remedy the pathologies of the global industrial system will be a politicised, democratised science. And if we make two more substitution –

• the pathologies of the global industrial system are the contradictions of capitalism, and
• democratised science is proletarian science

– then we are pretty much back to the inevitable revolutionary ascendency of the proletariat over the bourgeois, with the activist-academics playing a leading role. In this way the post-normal understanding of the practice of climate science resembles the neo-Marxist’s understanding of their own praxis in the social sciences during the 1970s and 1980s.

And so we might well say, with apologies to Marx:

Normal scientists have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point of the post-normal science is to change it.

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– BernieL

These were indeed two brave essays into this highly charged sceptical domain deserving the interest they received. But it is Ravetz’s intervention that is of particular interest to us here because he is primarily concerned with epistemology and scientific methodology. In fact, Ravetz believes that the conditions of knowledge in environmental sciences are so new and extraordinary that they require a new methodology. Since 1986 (earlier?) he has been advocating this new methodology for environmental science – and most particularly for the science of climate change.

Did Ravetz’s encouragement of participatory science legitimate corruption of scientific processes of the type now under investigation at CRU and the UN?

The new condition of practice prevailing in climate change science is not, as you might have guess, the post-modern condition that Jean-Francois Lyotard, famously describes in his essay of that name (translated in 1984). Rather it is the post-normal condition. And because climate change science is in a post-normal condition, normal science practice will fail. Thus, it is incumbent on scientists to abandon normal scientific practices and turn to this new way of doing science. Radical stuff! But was anyone listening?

Well apparently some were. A number of the prominent advocates of AGW, including Stephen Schneider, Hans von Storch and Mike Hulme refer to Ravetz approvingly. Von Storch and Hulme recognise climate science to be in this post-normal condition, and, in different ways, they support his call for a methodological revolution (watch this blog for more on their interpretations of PNS).

Now, it has always been my view that down through the history of science the various popular philosophies of science have rarely affected a direct and intended influence on the practice of science – they remain little more than a sideshow to the course and nature of its advance. Newtonian science may have been marketed on the continent as the marvellous product of Lockean doctrine of no-innate-ideas and all-we-know-arrises-from-the-senses. But in practice Newton’s mathematical investigations were another story. One exception to this rule is the German philosopher and physicist, Ernst Mach – with his strict alignment of knowledge with experience he seems to have influence the heated debates of a century ago in theoretical sub-atomic physics – and maybe you could make an argument for Karl Popper with his (new?) method of falsification. But here with Ravetz we may have another exception. Well, that is, if the blogger ‘ScientistForTruth’ (SFT) is right about his impact on the most controversial science of our day.

In a posting prior to Climategate (Climate Change and the Death of Science) and in the WUWT controversy, SFT argues that the methodological recommendations of Ravetz (and his colaborator Silvio Funtowicz) has influence climate change scientists so as to legitimate the corruption of normal scientific practices by political practices and outright activism. PNS promotes just the sort of corruption of normal scientific practices that are now under investigation at the University of East Anglia and at the United Nations.

For Ravetz, science in the post-normal condition is no longer about establishing truth, as this is impossible due to ‘irreducible uncertainties.’ In the post-normal condition these ‘high level uncertainties‘ sometimes approach ‘shear ignorance.‘ And yet, in this new method, positive claims can still be made. The quality of this science can be assured by involving what he calls ‘the extended peer community‘, which includes all stakeholders and interest groups. And the involvement of this community in the science is not limited to the normal-science process of peer review.  They participate in the very problem-solving strategies of the science, and in the scientific decision-making. This ‘democratisation of science‘ is also a politicisation such that political interactions are used to generate the knowledge and to develop the decisive conclusions upon which government policy can subsequently be based.

Some of the dangers that our blogger SFT sees in this methodology are that it could easily be interpreted as encouraging or legitimizing such corruptions as:  science practiced as activism; activist groups (such as Greenpeace and WWF) injecting advocacy into the scientific process; and the use of unscientific sources to establish scientific conclusions. Here is how Funtowicz and Ravetz, themselves, explain it in one of their landmark publication, Science for the post-normal age (1993):

The extension of the peer community is then not merely an ethical or political act; it can positively enrich the processes of scientific investigation…Those whose lives and livelihood depend on the solution of the problems will have a keen awareness of how the general principles are realized in their ‘back yards’. They will also have ‘extended facts’, including anecdotes, informal surveys, and official information published by unofficial means. It may be argued that they lack theoretical knowledge and are biased by self-interest; but it can equally well be argued that the experts lack practical knowledge and have their own unselfconscious forms of bias.

Note that this is not an argument for scientists to consult widely among locals or interest groups, it is not merely encouraging them to seek out informal sources of information. Rather, it is an argument for involving these non-scientists – using their informal knowledge as they choose – in a process of science that is political in nature:

Within such extended peer communities there will be the usual tensions between those with special-interest demands, and the outside activists with a more far-reaching agenda, along with the inevitable divisions along lines of class, ethnicity, gender and formal education. However, all such confusion is inevitable, and indeed healthy, in an embryonic movement which is fostering the transition to a new era for science.

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Judging from the responses to SFT comments at Ravetz’s WUWT post (and also to his much earlier blog-post on PNS), I guess I am not the only one who would like to investigate PNS further so as to verify the nature and extent of this influence on climate changed science. I will thus present some results of my preliminary investigations through a series of posts on this blog in the hope that, with the collaboration of others, we might over time sharpen the analysis and gain a clearer picture of what has been going on.

I will not be giving a general introduction to PNS here, but I encourage those who are unfamiliar with it to please explore some of the introductions to PNS that are already linked from here and others easily found around the web. You could start with the wikipedia article or some of the PNS research papers on open access, for example this one or this one.

What I would like to do first is start with their definition of a science in a post-normal condition, and then relate various aspects of this definition to the historical situation of this theory while at the same time finding its affinities with, and influences on, the practices of climate change science.

Here is the definition:

A science is in the post-normal condition when the facts are uncertain, values in
dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.

I intend to discuss these 3 aspects:

1. science as activism
2. making claims based on uncertainty or ignorance
3. the assessment of high stakes and urgency.

– BernieL

Climate science insiders (and outsiders) could see what was going on all along. And certainly anyone who cared to follow the controversy over the Hockey Stick graph after its publication in Nature in 1998 – and then prominently in the IPCC report of 2001 – they could detect dysfunction in these critical processes. But it would take the leaking of the Climategate emails to release more than a decade of pent-up protest breaking though the official silence, deflection and obfuscation.

Climate Audit blogger Steve McIntyre as he emerged in a profile in The Guardian, 9 Feb 2010

The momentum of Climategate permitted at last a critical reading of the IPCC 4th assessment report. Until this time any questioning, any challenge to the reports from outsiders, had been shouted down with the mantra that we should ignore anything but the proper peer-reviewed sources, and we should allay any doubts by trusting the assessment of these sources in the ‘gold standard’ of such authority, the IPCC reports. And throughout the heat of the emails scandal this mantra was shouted all the louder. Closer scrutiny of the 2007 report put the lie to this claim, revealing that in fact some of its most alarmist and controversial claims about the impacts of the predicted warming ran roughshod over peer-review science to establish an obscured authority via reference to ‘grey literature.’

As I write, we are now passing the point where the more this ‘gold standard’ mantra is chanted, the more foolish its choir appears, and the more legitimacy is awarded its critics. Blocked for so long, the pipes are clearing, and the normal critical processes of science look likely to start flow again – criticism will be permitted, primary data will be released and the claims of ‘certain’ and ‘settled’ science will recede. In the meantime, while waiting for this to unfold, we can pause to reflect on how the breakthrough was achieved, and consider in particular the appearance of a new mechanism of review that emerged heroic during this brief episode of scientific corruption. I refer to the extraordinary corrective role played by the blog.

Establishment science

In a BBC discussion earlier this week, Roger Harrabin presents a picture of a scientific ‘establishment’ completely unprepared for the recent onslaught. He uses as an example the announcement last week of the commencement of the UEA inquiry into Climategate. An outline of the inquiry was released, and a reviewing panel was announced a long three months after the inquiry had first been heralded. The gathered press were told that the inquiry is being conducted by the UEA, funded by the UEA, and with the advice of the Royal Society. Harrabin tells us how he posed a question about perceptions of vested interest, whether they had thought of establishing the inquiry with some degree of independence. They had not (although they gave a gentleman’s assurances that they would be independent). Harrabin was incredulous:  Here we have an establishment behaving in a normal way as if the internet is not going to shout back at them.  Harrabin finds himself witnessing an establishment entirely unprepared and remaining ill-equipped for the fact that they are dealing in everything they do with a broad global public in a way that is inconceivable to them when they started their careers.

Harrabin recognises this controversy as presenting a huge challenge to the way science is conducted, not just climate science but across the board, and it is also a crisis for science journalism:

What’s been difficult for people reporting the mainstream debate in the past has been that what we would call our trusted sources of Science – the RoySoc and various other corollary bodies in different countries (and the IPCC  set up to be the touchstone of probity on this issue) – these have been the providers of news. And those who have been doubting this news are not academics…and it has been difficult to establish what are the credentials when all of these establishment voices end up on one side, how can we pit them against a blogger, who might [have researched a lot of climate science and so] he may have a good knowledge, but we don’t know how to test this.

Indeed, this crisis for science journalism – and the way it has been met in recent weeks variously by the likes of Roger Harrabin, Fred Pearce (the Guardian), Andy Revkin (NYT) and Robin Williams (Aust. ABC) – this is a fascinating case study in itself. But, although intertwined, our interest here is in the impacts not so much on the journalism of science but on the processes of science. And so I pose this question about the climate science controversy:

Just how powerful has blogging become as a review mechanism of science?

Auditing climate science online

Consider firstly the most notorious blogger in the whole scandal, Steve McIntyre, who has used the web since 2003 to publicise his ‘audit’ of the statistical analysis of the data that gave the Hockey Stick graph. The unanswered questions and criticisms he raised became so notorious that an investigation was conducted by the National Academy of Science, and then by US Congress. It seems that these extraordinary processes of review were necessary because the normal processes were either unavailable, or had little effect in a situation of no small significance: His criticism could not be more damaging to a conclusion that could not be more influential – namely, that recent global warming is historically unprecedented.

McIntyre’s attempts to continue his ‘audit’ of the statistical methodology was stonewalled by authors, universities and journals all refusing the normal process of releasing the data behind the published conclusions. With the academic establishment defying their enlightenment creed of disclosure so as to fall behind the Hockey Team, the last resort for McIntyre and others was to the law and the Freedom Of Information Act. Repeated unrequited requests continued right up until the FOI2009.zip file was leaked. Finally, in the midst of Climategate and further scandals about the sourcing of weather station temperature data, CRU declared that some of the data could never be released for they had in fact been lost or destroyed.

During these years the Hockey Team had been publicly dismissive of the criticism of McIntyre and others who were outside the climate science establishment. But one of the revelations of the Climategate emails was just how concerned privately they actually were. With MacIntyre mentioned over 100 times, sometimes in very disparaging terms, some would say they were ‘obsessed’ with him. The ‘bunker mentality’ that many commentators (including supporters of AGW Alarmism) find evident in the emails is a bunkering down against the onslaught of critics such as McIntyre blogging glaring criticism of their science and then pressing for more data to be subject to their critical eye. The only attempt at any real public engagement with their critics was the establishment of the Real Climate blog, which sceptical commenters soon discovered operated more at the level of PR (or propaganda) than as a real forum for scientific discussion. The Hockey Stick, so prominent in the 2001 report, did not appear in the 2007 report largely due to McIntyre’s persistent attack. McIntyre had come from nowhere and, mostly through posting analysis on his blog and thereby rallying a visible following in the comments, he profoundly influenced the course of the public debate over the science of global warming.

Well, this is all history now, and since Climategate the debate over climate science has shifted – making it hard to imagine a return to the conditions under which the blog emerge as a powerful mechanism in the review process, and so the next question is:

Will the blog remain important or will its moment soon pass?

Blogging and science journalism

What we do know is that its moment has not yet passed, for it is only in the last few weeks that science journalists in the mainstream media have found that (despite the problem of authority mentioned above by Harrabin) they can no longer dismiss the blogs as little else but sound and fury. For much of the criticism of the ‘grey’ and obscured authorities cited in the IPCC 4th assessment came through blogs, sometimes emerging through anonymously posted comments. And so now in The Guardian, The Times and the Harrabin’s own BBC no less, we find not only the reporting of these source of the news breaks, but also their legitimation as forums of review. The blogs run by the likes of McIntyre, Anthony Watts and A W Montford are now recognised as legitimate and credible sources of criticism. It is the difficulty, but necessity, of accepting their authority that Harrabin describes as ‘a huge challenge’ for science and ‘a really big moment’ for science journalism. This shift in journalistic response to the ‘blogosphere’ was most abruptly marked by a shift in The Guardian’s coverage of the controversy during the 2nd week February 2010, where the Bloggers began to appear as legitimate and somewhat vindicated actors in the whole drama (e.g., see this report featuring McIntyre). And this brings us back to the announcement last week of the UEA Climategate inquiry.

The head of the inquiry, Sir Muir Russell, issued a statement that none of the inquiry members have a ‘predetermined view on climate change and climate science.‘ Many saw this declaration as an ill-considered, if not absurd claim, considering that most of the panel, with the Royal Society, had already made their views on climate change and the science behind it pretty darn clear.

Meanwhile, at Bishop Hill, Montford duly reports the announcement of the panel members, and the claims of their impartiality. Phillip Campbell, the chief editor of Nature – the journal that first published the Hockey Stick – had been elected to the panel for his expertise on the peer review process. Clearly, he was exposed, and it was not long before a commenter attached a link to an interview where Campbell clearly stated his predetermined view that there was no evidence of wrong-doing in the emails. This was picked up by the mainstream media, and within 6 hours of the announcement Campbell had resigned. But it did not stop there, with other members of the panel easily identified with predetermined views on climate change. Faced with so much ridicule on the blogs, Sir Russell soon backed down from the claim of impartiality…and then this back down became the subject of ridicule…and so it continues…

The serious side to this debacle is that the inquiry became necessary because of the apparent failure of normal processes of scientific review. And, as Harrabin had already intimated even before this farce had played out, here we have the scientific ‘establishment’ – in this case represented by the UEA, the Royal Society and Nature – surely on the highest alert, yet seemingly oblivious to the power of the blogs to quickly unmask yet another barely obscured contradiction. What is new is that now no one in the press, and no one in the establishment, can deny anymore that this unmasking of contradictions in the blogs does really matter.

So clearly the blog is continuing to play a vital role in bringing this establishment to accounts. The question is whether there is a role for the blog if the normal processes of review starts to work again. What I wonder is whether, when the dust finally settles, we find that these extraordinary condition has indeed introduced a new mode of review, and that the model for might be Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That?

In just 3 years Watts Up With That? has established itself as a general forum for climate science discussion that is entirely open, voluntary and informal. Watts’ role is not so much as a climate science expert, but more as an editor, selecting items for discussion and debate, but in an environment free of the institutional framework of academic science. In recent times it has become more common for Watts to invited guest experts to post short article, and this places him in a role much more closely akin to a journal editor. Yet there are differences between his role and that of Phillip Campbell at Nature, and difference in the review processes they oversee.

For one, Campbell won his position through career advancement, while Watts won his position by popular interest. Another difference is that publication at Watts’ blog exists entirely outside the system linked to academic career advancement. Out in the wilderness Watts has unfetted freedom and power over his own domain – he has more personally control over what is promoted and publish. Another difference with the academic journal is that on the blog review (both peer and popular) occurs after publication, and it is much broader, open and immediate.

My question is whether this science blog is offering the model for a new process of scientific review, or is it just an artefact of a time when the normal process of review had become so obstructed that such extraordinary means became but a temporary necessity?

– BernieL

Glaciergate refers to a claim made in the IPCC 4th assessment report (2007) that, at the present rate of warming, all the Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear by 2035. If these glaciers did all disappear, it would have devastating consequences for millions of people living downstream who rely on the glaciers for year-round supply of water. And so if this were likely to happen soon, then it would be the causes for some alarm for all these peoples and their governments. When a report submitted to the Indian government in 2009 brought this claim into question, the head of the IPCC called it ‘voodoo science.’ Only in January 2010, after it had scandalised the press, did the IPCC retract the claim.

How exactly the 2035 date made it into the IPCC report remains unclear, but we do know that the (non-peer review) WWF report cited for the claim was in turn based on information in a magazine article (New Scientist) which was based on a single interview with a single glaciologist who claims his speculation was never so precise as to propose a dated prediction.

What makes this so scandalous for science is that it seemed that anyone with any expertise would not support the claim — in fact it would be absurd to suggest that such large masses of ice could melt so fast. And many had already said so. Expert reviewers had queried the claim before the report was published, and others did so very publicly after it was published, and long before the scandal and the retraction.

As outrageous as the whole affair appears to outsiders, there are those who would say that we should not be surprised by the survival in scientific documents of such unsubstantiated claims as this. In fact, critics of such pseudo-science show how the persistence in scientific literature of such unsubstantiated and/or refuted claims is not at all unusual. And as Bjorn Lomborg (and also, more recently, Aynsley Kellow) has shown, such phoney science is most especially prevalent in the environmental sciences.

Politicised Science (Theology) in the 16th Century: Martin Luther depicted by Catholic opponents greasing the Peasants' boot during the Peasants' War - the 'buntschuch' was the symbol of their rebellion. In fact, Luther was to use his status as a theologian to condone the slaughter of the 'marauding' peasants by their princes' armies.

The Politicisation of Science

In a speech of 2003 the famous fiction writer, Michael Crichton, shows how there has been a creeping toleration of pseudo-science in government-funded science during the latter decades of the 20th century. This is where claims are upheld despite the fact that there is a lack of scientific evidence for them, or the apparent evidence has been show to be unsound. He cites recent climate science as constituting the most extreme example yet.

In the history of the movement to mitigate anthropogenic global warming (AGW) there has often been an implicitly or explicitly stated licence to exaggerate the negative impacts. This is so as to raise the alarm with frightening scenario in order to prompt people and governments into action. Here is one of the founders of the movement, Stephen Schneider, talking to Discover magazine in 1989:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.

Given this licence to raise the alarm by bending the facts, we should therefore not be surprised that, after the Glaciergate scandal emerged, the author overseeing the chapter that included the 2035 melt claim would be reported defending the inclusion of this claim, despite knowing it came from outside the peer review process, because it related to several countries in this region and their water sources. Well, yes, that is a reason that it is important to get it right. But he goes on to say: we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. What he seems to be suggesting is that a claim that was not on good authority was included because it would cause alarm.

While exaggerated predictions of future doom is a big part of AGW alarmism, it is not the only problem. There is also the claims about the degenerate conditions of the world as it is. Lomborg’s book, The Sceptical Environmentalist is subtitled measuring the real state of the world as a challenge to the annual State of the World report and its ‘litany’ of environment ills, declining from bad to worse. On the evidence, as Lomborg sets forth, things are not so bad, and mostly seem to be getting better. How could it be that the accepted science could be so wrong?

Scientific Alarmism before AGW: Aliens, Nuclear Winter, Passive Smoking…

Michael Crichton attempts to explain this plague of false science from an historical perspective. This doom and gloom pseudo-science seems to have arisen with the public policy advocacy of a set of prominent scientists of the 1960s and 70s. This group includes Schneider, but more famously Paul Erlich and Carl Sagan. For Crichton this is not exclusively a problem for environmental science, and he finds an early and influential precedent in the USA government-funded SETI program, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. This program was in some ways legitimated by a grandiose but meaningless equation, the Drake equation. SETI had its critics but, Crichton says,

The fact that this equation was not met with screams of outrage similar to the screams of outrage that greet each Creationist new claim, for example – meant that now there was a crack in the door, a loosening of the definition of what constituted legitimate scientific procedure. And soon enough pernicious garbage began to squeeze through the cracks.

The next example Crichton gives is the pseudo-science of the Nuclear Winter, which, he says, included the claim that even a limited 5,000 megaton nuclear exchange would cause a global temperature drop of more than 35 degrees Centigrade, and this change would last for three months. Crichton shows how the Nuclear Winter scenario had begun to be widely promoted in the popular media (including talk-shows and films) by a group of scientist, including Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, even before in came out  in a science journal. Again, the science was criticised, but the moral and political considerations expressed by Schnieder in 1988 (in the quote above) are already at play here in the Cold War 1970s, as Crichton explains:

Although Richard Feynman was characteristically blunt, saying, I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about, other prominent scientists were noticeably reticent. Freeman Dyson was quoted as saying It’s an absolutely atrocious piece of science but…who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war? And Victor Weisskopf said, The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.

In another example – the refuted link between passive smoking and cancer — the USA EPA plays a role of a politicised government scientific organisation so as to foreshadow the more extremely politicised characteristics of the IPCC.

Virtuous Corruption

In most of Crichton’s examples, and in Lomborg’s environmentalist Litany, there is not only a strong and palpable political motive (sometimes explicitly licensed) to distort the science, but also a motive for others not to criticise it. Who wants to be seen to favour nuclear war? Who is for taking the side of Big Tobacco? or Big Oil? And who in the environmental sciences wants to be anti-environment?  Aynsley Kellow in his Science and Public Policy calls the phenomenon so affected, ‘virtuous corruption.’ And this will be the subject of another post.

- BernieL

The illustration from the title page of Practica über die grossen und manigfaltigen Coniunctionen der Planeten die im jat MDXXiiii by Leonhard Rynmann

Firstly, it is a powerful and pervasive movement in the natural sciences. In the past decade it has come to involve most of the grand old natural science institutions, from the journal Nature to the Royal Society and the Nobel Institute, and it has even generated its own specialist institutions such as CRU [*], Goddard (NASA) and the UN’s IPCC.  Global warming is linked to research funding, not just in climate science, but across the natural sciences, and human induced global warming has been linked to all sorts of (mostly judged degenerative) changes in the natural world.

Secondly, there is the problem of its dubious evidence-base. This is what marks it for special attention: at the height of its power, the scientific evidence gives no reason for alarm. The evidence suggests that the warming of the late 20^th century was not outside the natural variation that has proved tolerable (if not advantageous) to civilisation. Nor is there evidence that the recommended program of CO2 emission reduction will significantly affect cooling.

Thirdly, there is the unusual landscape of vested interests that could be proposed to be causing this distortion of the science. While it does now seem that climate science funding policy is perpetuating the scare, and that governments have created vested interests to help prevent the supposed catastrophe – e.g., investment in renewable energy, energy conservation, and trade and tax on CO2 emissions – there was yet no obvious external vested interest in emission reductions in the first place. Instead, potential candidates for vest interest lobbying in the field of greenhouse emissions, like the mining, oil or energy lobby – who have an apparent interest on the side of the sceptics – are now often found overtly supporting the alarmism.

These are the broad reasons why, in my view, Global Warming Alarmism is of interest to the history of science. However, it is my experience that most folks interested in the history of science are not in the climate scepticism camp, and so they will find objection to my second reason, and therefore they will attach an entirely different significance to this movement. If you are firm in the view that the proposal that CO2 emissions is causing catastrophic global warming is well supported by the evidence, then this site will be of little interest to you. I can only recommend, if you have not already done so, that you review the evidence yourself, especially that presented on the blogs (yes blogs!) Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. Otherwise, I bid a polite good-bye.

For those that are left, I hope that you also find this topic as exciting and challenging as I do.  For the past year I have been intent on coming to an understanding of what is going on here, and yet I have made very little progress! The idea of this blog is to open up the discussion with others who might also be fascinated by this problem and see if we can make some progress together.

I am especially interest in finding similarities to previous movements in science, both modern and pre-modern. My interest in the history of science is especially in the relationship of modern science with what was called ‘enthusiasm’ at the time when the first state-sponsored scientific organisations were instituted.  In the 17^th century, when the Royal Society gained its charter,  ‘enthusiasm’ referred to the panic and alarmism generated by the apocalypse predictions of doomsayers prophets prominent during the Interregnum. These various alarmist movements continued into the early Restoration when the Royal Society of London positioned itself to mitigate their destabilising influence. In fact, they successfully promoted empirical science as a sober and reasonable panacea for this enthusiasm. I am also fascinated by the importance of medieval astrology to the revival of mathematics, and to the early advance of modern empirical sciences from astronomy, to chemistry and medicine. In the current Global Warming alarmism there seem to be links to both this medieval astrology and to apocalyptic enthusiasm – but not those you might first expect. While I am still unclear of the nature and strength of these links, they do seem to challenge the conventional Enlightenment narrative of the triumph of modern empirical science.

The sorts of issues I would like to raise are as follows:

1. In the first place, the explanations of this Alarmism given by others including Michael Crichton’s account.
2. The politicisation of climate scientists and its historical precedents.
3. Industrial military complex – how relevant Eisenhower’s warning
4. The scientific institutions established with a Global Warming agenda and any precedents.
5. ‘Reason is a slave to the passions’ – How relevant is David Hume’s Enlightenment scepticism today?
6. The ‘consensus’ of scientists – is this a substitute for evidence?
7. Fear campaigning and grant money, and any historical precedents
8. Environmentalism as religion.
9. The ‘peer review’ bastion and the barbarian bloggers. How significant is Climate Audit’s impact on the science of the Hockey (stick) Team?
10. Professional/Amateur – the impact of this dispute on the modern assumption that  ‘professional’ meaning high standard and ‘amateur’ mean lower standard.
11. Good and Evil: The use of the term ‘denier’ in the scientific literature including Nature journal
12. Reason and Madness – scepticism understood as a form of madness
13. Doomsayers, Enthusiasm in science – looking to the Royal Society foundation and lessons for viewing modern scientific doomsaying
14. The bonfires of the scholarly – Savonarola and the collapse of the Florentine renaissance, and related to apocalypsism in modern science.
15. Astrological enthusiasm in medieval science – any similarities with modern scientific alarmism.

This is not a program of postings but only a grab-bag of ideas – which I am hoping visitors might add to in the comments. Over the next few week I will fix up this site, take a holiday and return to start a weekly post [**] from late January.

- BernieL

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* UPDATE: I am now of the understanding that, while CRU is now an institution of AGW Alarm, it has not always been so. But I have yet to confirm the rationale behind its establishment in 1971 in any primary document — and I am cautious about the secondary literature, as I know it contains distortions concerning the founding director of CRU, the sceptic Hubert Lamb.

** UPDATE: As can be seen in the blog roll, the idea of a weekly posts never eventuated. Instead, difficulties in finding time to research each topic around family and work commitments meant that I have been lucky to posting month.

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